Shaping Machines

Don't spoil it!

Neil

Neil,

You might find this interesting

MichaelG.

.

Bazyle [and Neil]

Yes, that's true ... and I fully accept that Five and Ten are obvious numbers to use for tallying.

However; with the introduction of Zero, and "place ordered" "base ten" notation, the ten human digits became less relevant.

They teach children that we use base ten because we have ten fingers ... but I find that explanation hard to accept.

MichaelG.

Perhaps we need another thread for discussing arithmetic.

Most shapers won't reverse the feed when you reverse the ratchet, until you take up the backlash in the feedscrew. This is because there is nothing to stop the friction in the ratchet dragging the screw back and forth around one place, apart from the friction of the screw in the nut and the bearings. So until the screw is wound in the new direction enough to take up the backlash, they will not feed. If the friction in the ratchet is excessive they might still not work. The ratchet unit is usually mounted on the screw, so too much friction here can be a problem.

Ian, the 10 inch Alba is an excellent machine, small enough accomodate compared to some, while big enough to do some really useful work. I beleive some had three phase motors, but the base is big enough to accomodate conversion to single phase, which I think is what has been done to mine. It does not look like a factory installation anyway. The main downside of them is that the door for adjusting the stroke is really too small and makes that awkward. So if the machine is still at the school, you want to try and grab it if you can.

John

So what is this article about shapers to help me make a decision whether to trek out to WHS to buy it

John,

Far be it from me to puit you off, but the first article was a discursive discussion of what shapers are and can do. You may wish to wait for the later ones which I guess will be more about using them.

Neil

Wot? So I'm not supposed to answer? It didn't seem like a rhetorical question.

At least it was an oblique reference. I suspect that anybody who knows what two's complement is, knows the answer anyway, and anybody who doesn't may be curious enough to go and look it up.

Andrew

Cheers

Know what they are and do having researched stuff when I got my Elliott. Will do as you suggest and plan some mooching visits to WHS.

TBH this is a bit frustrating as I subscribe to MEW as I thought it was about tools and tooling and would have expected an article like this to be in there. I have no interest in models hence why I don't get ME

John

John,

Far be it from me to puit you off, but the first article was a discursive discussion of what shapers are and can do. You may wish to wait for the later ones which I guess will be more about using them.

Neil

Picked up the latest ME on my weekly visit to town, and in the second article of the series Mick is getting down to what we were expecting

These articles should be of great interest to me since my first job as a school - leaver and first machine was a shaper. I had never seen one before. I had to grind my own tools on a tool grinder the like of which many of us have got today. Should be very interesting what the articles say compared with what I learned all those years ago. The factory BTW was on top of a filled - in cutting of the old Dyke Railway branch in Hove, Sussex.

Edited By DMB on 18/07/2013 20:05:59

John; I understand the dilemma; I like model building, but we model builders use tools. And, maintain them sometimes, although models are the primary thing.

Sometimes I pick up MEW at the newsstand, because there are items of general interest to modellers in it. (sometimes I miss it at the news stand, when I want to read an article talked about here, though!)

Really, IMHO, there should be one magazine not two, like it was for about a century, but that's just my (not important) opinion.

Another JohnS.

There have not been many articles about using a shaper, but there were 2 way back in MEW nos 22 & 24 by Bill Morris. Phil

Maybe Diane is starting to work her way back to that?? Where is DC1 these days???