WHERE ARE THE SHAPER USERS ?

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I stand corrected, John

MichaelG.

Handy for making gears.

If you need one gear then use a shaper to make 3 or 4 at the same time and part off on the lathe

One heck of a machine Richard, should keep you busy for a few days....yikes

They're great for tough jobs where a nice accurate mill would be taxed and receive un-necessary wear and tear, the shaper is a machine shop workhorse which uses simple tools and can last a lifetime

A lot of work carried out on a milling machine using expensive end mills and the like can be done just as well (with better finishes in many cases) on a shaper using a single point tool easily resharpened on an off hand grinder.

I do admit though to having a soft spot for these “dinosaurs” of the machine shop (as I recently heard them described). A shaper was the very first machine tool I was let loose on as a young apprentice and the love affair continues. Click the link and scroll down to see my refurb.

**LINK**

Heres mine, which is an Alba 1A and has just come out of it's hiding place for an oil up in order to cut an internal keyway for the little red tractor in the background. Why did I buy it? It was a good price, and I have never forgiven myself for turning down an Alba No 2 (maybe3) from a local school because at that time I had nowhere to put it. I did buy a HarrisonH mill and a Raglan V mill though, but the poor old Alba, went for scrap....................I still have sleepless nights

Phil

Nice paint job Rik, was it sprayed or brushed ?

Thanks Richard - it was brushed. Apart from the "dulux refurb" and a bare metal buff up I did not have to do to much else as there was / is little evidence of wear - amazing given the age of the machine (1959).

Rik

Alternatively you can just angle the clapper / toolholder to the correct angle from the vertical - that's what they are designed for. What an embarrassing mistake to make - did he / you get a good talking to?

http://neme-s.org/Shaper%20Books/shaper_book_page.htm 

Edited By Muzzer on 16/09/2016 21:26:32

Edited By Muzzer on 16/09/2016 21:27:24

Here's a picture of a 30" Elliott I used to use a few years ago, cutting dovetails in a 9" cube of EN9, no problems at all,

I'm not sure that there are too many "must have" reasons for a shaper, since there will always be other ways of doing the job. However they are hard to beat for producing a flat surface with a finish approaching that of a surface grinder. They are probably more use for the guys building stationary and marine steam engines than for the locomotive guys, and also of course they are good for making angle plates and other parts for machine tools. You can also do some interesting things by mounting the job between centres on the shaper table.

Dovetails are fun to do, and one advantage of the shaper is that you don't need to find a cutter to match an existing dovetail. I've needed to make dovetails with 55 degree and 60 degree angles. The same tooling will do for both. You can also do T slots, again without actually buying any special tooling, although you will need to braze some bits of high speed steel onto suitable shanks.

I have three shapers myself, a 7 inch Amco, a 10 inch Alba 1A, and an 18 inch Alba. Obviously I don't really need that many but they are nice to have. Actually I used to have four, I had a 14 inch Alba as well.

I've never heard of a shaper knocking its table right off, although a shaper crash can do a bit of damage. My Amco has had a repair done to the slotted arm which has been brazed back together, so sometime before I acquired it something noisy has happened. My 18 inch Alba had a piece missing from the dovetail of the downfeed when I got it, so it looks like that has been rammed into a job or the vice at some point. I was able to repair it by machining the broken faces square screwing on a block, then machining it to match the existing dovetail. (Using one of my other shapers!)

John

I've never heard of a shaper knocking its table right off

It was one of the biggies, a 36" cincinnatti or a hydraulic rockwell kinda thing, some guys chatting on a US based site. They still seem to be pretty popular in the USA and have a good fanbase, I used to be a bit obsessed with shapers and read everything and anything I could find.

There is one thing a shaper can do a mill can't and that's cut it's own table. Here's mine, I love watching this thing

Shapers have always frightened the life out of me !!

They must have originated in Victorian times and maybe they were used to shape a lot of the castings on traction engines and locomotives ? Don't think I would have the courage to operate one.

Mike.

They are great for doing rough and pitted surfaces, and the final result is as close to perfectly flat as any machine can achieve, so shapers/planers would have been a Victorian essential in any machine shop

No workshop is too small for a shaper, mine is almost a hundred years old and still machines dead flat and parallel and builds up the right arm muscles as well!

Dangerous, I used one at 13 years of age at Tech. school. i made a woodworking vice and also cut a 1" square thread on a lathe driven by overhead shafting.

Clive

I suspect when buying a shaper and sometime other machines it would be worth checking any shear pins that are fitted.It's not all that unusual to find that they have been replaced with welding rod that has a much higher UTS than annealed brass.

As surprising as it might sound the chips off them can be pretty hot and can fly around so some sort of catch plate to intercept them if that is happening isn't a bad idea - and don't as I have seen on some youtube video's look along the work at eye level while moving the table to position for the first cut with the ram going.

I tried to find a video of one doing some really hard work. I think one guy did but along work with the jaws very wide open and he reckoned that the camera had run out of memory. I wonder if the work shot out or etc. He did have one interesting idea though to set speed - just fast enough for the chips to go very pale straw as they settle on the table.

I think they went out of use in larger companies pretty rapidly post WWII. Along with some other toolmaking aspects. Even high precision turning to a great extent.

John

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Mine was made in 1972 by Karl Anderle of Steyr, Austria. Model URK56, It has a built in dividing attachment and the table is height controlled by a hydraulic tracer. It can do copy profiling by means of a template. Was originally designed to produce punches and dies. Mine was used to make graphite tooling for spark erosion machines. Obsolete now due to CNC, very few appear to have survived. Nice toy though! Camera batteries flat, I will add photos to my album in a day or two.

Dave

Different machines have different advantages, I use my 10" Elliot a lot. It is able to do wide flat surfaces much more easily than my small vertical mill and uses far cheaper tools that can be sharpened on a bench grinder. One job it did easily was to thin down several pieces of a broken Landrover leaf spring for a model using a HSS toolbit. My milling cutters didn't like that job at all. The shaper is ideal for surfacing tough, rough or rusty pieces of metal from my outdoor scrap heap. The shaper will cut long narrow slots exactly to the tool width with no variation at all and gear teeth close to a shoulder but on the other hand it is not really the best machine for boring holes so I don't understand why some folks want to compare it with the mill. They are quite different. Long live the shaper AND the mill.

Colin

The pale straw idea is about right for high speed steel tooling. You can use carbide tooling too, in which case having the chips come off blue and smoking is perfectly acceptable. I use some uncoated carbide tips, brazed onto key steel shanks. They are the sort with no hole and no top rake, eg a flat triangle shape. I sharpen them with a diamond wheel. I don't know what the grade of carbide is since they were being given away at the club. The guy who donated them said they had been trying them at work for turning and found them useless, but they are fine on the shaper.

I have had a chip fly out and land in the little hollow at the bottom of my neck, not too much fun! The 18 inch Alba can take a quarter of an inch off cast iron in a single pass with ease.

Shapers should not be compared with a vertical mill, the real comparison is with a horizontal mill. The horizontal mill can give a similar finish, but the cutters to do so are much more expensive. My Alba can do a flat face 18 inches wide with a single very cheap tool...the stack of cutters for a horizontal mill to do that would be much more expensive to buy and much trickier to get sharpened. The horizontal mill is of course much faster, and given a suitable set of cutters, can mass produce jobs with slots, chamfers and so on in one pass, a lot faster than a shaper would. The cost of the cutters matters a lot less when they are spread over many jobs. So for mass production there is no question, and industry has gone for milling machines. For an amateur, the economics are very different, and there is much to be said for a shaper.

Are they dangerous? Well, all machine tools are dangerous to some degree, and I think I fear the woodworking tools in my workshop the most. The danger with shapers is I think partly that the ram seems to be moving at a leisurely pace, and guys are tempted to do things like wipe the loose chips off the job with a spare hand. Do not do this...if you must, use a brush with a long handle. You should usually be working from beside the machine so are not too much in the line of fire of anything that comes loose.

John