An old Shaper found in Phuket Town

After driving past a machine shop many times each week for several years I had a reason to walk past it and spotted this beasty dragged outside with some token rain protection draped over it.

It's a SCHUGHARDT & SCHUTTE of LONDON machine. After staring and scratching my head for a while I realised it was some kind of shaper on steroids. I eventually identified the clapper and found it was still free to move. The drive uses belts albeit with an electric motor instead of the original overhead shaft. Whereas a conventional shaper drives the cutting arm backwards and forwards this machine looks to have a sliding carriage for the work piece while the cutter slowly traverses sideways.

My son offered to buy the machine for me but a >2m tall machine is too big even for my spacious workshop.

Why is this monster sitting in Phuket town a few hundred metres away from the Central Festival shopping centre? I guess it is a legacy of the old tin mining days.

Hi Colin, It's a planer rather than a shaper. Looks like a good one. It would be very handy for surfacing large plates as used for tooling and fixturing, especially if the shop did not have a milling machine big enough to handle large plates.

Also handy for planing guide blocks and axle boxes for railway use or for guide bars / sockets on heavy equipment.

Several shops local to me still use planers for surfacing die plates for stamping dies before final finish by Blanchard grinding.

Yep it's a planer, bigger brother of the shaper where the work moves not the tool.

I'd love a smaller one but they command big bucks for the few I've seen for sale.

Beautiful machine, buy it and admire it lol

Mick

Hate the damn things. Last one I had to use I was machining the "V" guideways down the sides of half a dozen thread rolling blocks each weighing about two tons. Nightmare!!

There is a Morrisons now where it all happened

Rik

Is it for sale?

Posted by Jeff Dayman on 21/05/2019 15:17:11everal shops local to me still use planers for surfacing die plates for stamping dies before final finish by Blanchard grinding.

Probably better surface off the planer before the grinding.

Drummond and early Myford lathe beds were finished on something about that size. If you licked it back into shape (pun intended) you could pay for it with a refurb service.

There was a planer where i served my time. Only seen it used a couple of times while i was there. Invented by Nasmyth i seem to recall, or was that the shaper ?

There was a planer in the fitting shop where I served my apprenticeship; it was mainly used to machine up long dies for the press brakes in the press bay for bending sheet steel items. IIRC the clapper box was either electrically or electro / mechanically activated so that the tool didn't clatter & bounce on the return stroke of a long die being machined, can't remember what make it was.

George.

Quite a small planer & quite basic - most (probably more recent than this) that I came across had at least two toolboxes on the crossrail and one one each vertical way on the columns. This one doesn't look like it was intended to have the vertical running toolboxes, as the crossrail ways (also used for the vertical toolboxes) don't go below the top of the table. I have seen one operating with all 4 tools at once roughing out the top & both sides lathe bed casting - quite a time saver if the job allowed it.

At my last employment we converted a Butler planer (8' x 8' x 40' IIRC - rescued from "outside storage" at a paper machinery manufacturer) to CNC operation. While primarily a milling machine (a new milling head replaced one of the toolboxes), the customer wanted to retain the planing operation. The customer made points & crossings for railways & tramways and thought that they could plane the wheel flange clearance groove in large radius crossing castings. It did work after a fashion, but the problem was tool clearance in the groove - the tool really needed an additional rotation axis to keep the tool perpendicular to the rail face as it went round the curve & as it didn't have one the tool had to be ground back so much to give clearance that it was too weak.. We used a 37Kw AC spindle motor in servo mode though a ZF low backlash reduction gearbox to drive the table, with two sets of parameters for planing or milling operation.

Sadly now a largely dissappeared breed - not "cost effective" enough for a modern production environment that seemingly doesn't value their strengths & capabilities. A situation that I have, unhappily, helped along at my current employment when the owner decided to scrap a very tidy, one previous owner Swift Summerskill planer rather than convert it to a milling machine. There have been a number of machines I have been glad to see the scrap man take away in bits, but that wasn't one of them & I still feel bad about it.

Nigel B

Just for a moment I thought that was my workshop , then I realised, it was too tidy.

Nice machine; if I ever win the lottery a man sized planer is on my list of machine tools. Double column as well. I've always wondered about the planers with only one support column for the tool slide. There must be one hell of a twisting load in the column? I've always had a soft spot for planers ever since I saw one in operation back in the early 1970s at W.H.Allens in Bedford. It must have been 8x8x30, or thereabouts. On my shop floor tour it was planing fabricated crankcases for medium size diesel engines.

Andrew

I used to work for Cincinnati at Biggleswade where they made similar machines for surface broaching.

Ford bought one where they mounted half a dozen crank cases to a “pallet “ and broached out the main bearing and sump in a single pass.

The machine shop where I spent my 1st 3 months as a trainee Mechanical Engineer in the early 70's had a muchl arger Butler planer. It was in regular use. That shop was built in the early 1960's.

The old machine shop, about 1928 had a vertical wall planer, also in constant use att he time but was gone by the mid 80's.

That is a small planer.

Interesting; my syndicate partner in my big glider (Nimbus) did an apprenticeship at Cincinnati in Biggleswade in the mid to late 1960s.

Andrew

Andrew, I worked for the Cincinnati Milacron Electronic controls div which had a UK centre in Bedford, Caxton Rd. That then moved over to Bigglewade in about 1980 as the Machine tool division moved up to Birmingham. I believe that the Milacron division was bought out by Morse Controls in about 1990 and of course Cincinnati UK disappeared all together (2006 ??).

Bob

That's interesting too. When I was in the Bedford model engineering club in the early 1970s one of the members gave me a lot of help, and allowed me loose in his workshop on Saturday mornings. I think he worked at Brookhurst Igranic, which made heavy duty electrical control systems for cranes, mines and the like. As I recall the company was taken over by Cincinnati Milacron, although I'm not sure when?

Andrew

I suspect the guy delivering it couldn't get it in the factory and said "Phuket" it can stay there...

I worked for the Cincinnati Milacron Electronic controls div which had a UK centre in Bedford

The Technical director at my previous employer worked there. I guess he would have been there in the late 70's - do you recall Dave Crewe at all ?

Nigel B

I too worked at Cincinatti in Biggleswade , late 70's. I finished off my Apprenticeship there working in the machine shop. I was on the turning section running a Churchill copy lathe churning out machine spindles from forged billets. Then worked on a Cincinnati CNC machine centre programmed with punched tape.

In another of the machine shops there was the mother of all planers churning out machine bases.

It's a housing estate now.

Phil.