Dovetails

Edited By ady on 30/04/2011 09:44:00

Some things are sad, my old mate, known him for 50 years. was an inveterate buyer of tools, he had a Hercus lathe (south bend) , virtually unused large, round columb milling machine, power hacksaw, and a 14' shaper, he also had two, 7 foot high steel cabinets full of tooling and measuring equipment, including a 10' rotary table which was indexable, with all the extra plates, this he brought just for one job only. He is older than me, and is now getting dementia he had forgotten that Id'e asked him if he wanted to sell the shaper and the mill. Anyway I think he sold his whole workshop as a job lot, so someone got a bargain!!!, his wife did not have any idea what it is now worth which is a shame, because he practically gave it all away. I was thinking of making a shaper, similar to the Gingery aluminium shaper, but at the moment I have not finished making the furnace, (next job), unfortunately down here, in OZ, the scarp metal merchants wont sell to the general public any more so getting scrap ally, brass and bronze is out, so is the shaper!!!! . Unless,??? it is worth while making a small hand shaper/slotter, similar to the plans on the internet, or just stick with the mini mill,

Doing dovetails without a lathe or a mill is a pain in the butt, I know, cause when I used to make snooker cues, I needed to make the brass joints, so I made a lathe, using one of those cheap Chinese double cross slides, and the 2 meter long wood lathe, turned up most of the round pieces, but the dovetails for the cross and compound slides, I fabricated from flat steel and bars, using a welded up jig set at 30/60 degrees, and the large angle grinder mounted on a hardwood bracket, and slid them along a guide, cut the angled fairly closely then bolted them together, used a piece of granite with wet and dry emery paper to get them accurate, They still needed to fine tuned with a file and scraper, which was tedious to say the least, bolted and pinned everthing together, and it worked !!! .(sorry no smilie faces, they stop my posts), Now Iv'e got a good lathe and a small mill, they do make a difference in making IC engines and swarf, Although I did stopped making snooker cues, the Asians make quality cues 1/3 of the price that I paid just for the timber.

Any thoughts on making a small shaper, too broke and mean to buy one though.

John Holloway

Hello.

I'm building a shaper machine following the book by David Gingery and introducing some modifications of my own.
The shaper machine is not yet able to test cutting with it. There are still a few hours of work to do...
Basically, I lack the building of the table for fixing the material to be cut, the simple mechanism of automatic feed of this same table and the underlying structure that will support the engine. For now, the shaper is mounted on a bench workmate Black & Decker with a temporary motor and it works very strongly and very smoothly.

But for those who might be interested in a machine like this there is an example that can be viewed cutting metal (I think aluminum alloy) at the following URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZdbNWoySo0. There are some more movies of the same shaper machine. You can look for rgsparber (its builder).

In my album there is a set of photographs dedicated to building my shaper machine that shows some of the steps in its construction almost entirely from solid blocks of aluminum http://www.model-engineer.co.uk/albums/member_album.asp? a = 8270

Edited By ady on 01/05/2011 03:14:13