Iggy, I think you can figure this one out for yourself. Shapers were obsolete by 1970. Since then, most of them have been scrapped or gathered dust. And it wasn't CNC that killed them off. It was their slow part-to-part production speed.
As I said, I've seen two actually operating in commercial shops since
1974. Both were squaring up mold bases, which is a traditional job for them.
For a hobbyist, the cheap tooling is an attraction. So is cutting square-cornered internal holes, if you make falling-block rifles or valve gear for historical steam engines -- hobby work.
That's not a shaper. That's a planer. Like shapers, there are a couple of tasks for which a few shops still use them. Until 50 years ago, machine tool bedways usually were cut with planers. Through the '50s and '60s, many of them were converted to milling machines ("planer-mills") and used for the same long-travel jobs that the planers were used for.
I've been out of the business (except as a customer) for a while but most shops I see today often have one over in the back corner and most of the shops I was in, in my working life, had one.
As someone else wrote they can do a lot of jobs with limited tooling that the user can make himself. I've used them as a planer to produce a flat surface, cut gears on one, used them as a slotter to cut key seats, cut both male and female dovetails,and I can't remember what all else.
Hardly the first tool I'd buy but I certainly wouldn't turn one down if I had the space.
John B. fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Everyone keeps saying that! Doesn't anybody read the OPs anymore?
He said, "...they make press brake dies with them ".
Since press brake dies usually require some sort of grooved profile, and since the basic difference between 'planer' and 'shaper' is the shape of the blade and work -- shapers being relegated to grooves and edging, mostly...
BTW... one other common use for long-throw shapers over the years has been for hobbiests to convert them into manual milling machines. I've seen a number of them in service, mostly made from old Logans.
Those are called Planers..and work very much like shapers. With shapers the cutting tool moves over the work..with planers..the work moves under the cutter.
Err... the basic difference between planers and shapers is that a planer table moves and the tool is stationary while shapers are quite the opposite. Nothing that I've seen restricts one, or the other to any specific type of cut.
Lloyd, here's what the >I know of one specific place that uses shapers not mills - they have
Where have you ever seen a shaper with a 30 foot travel?
I figure the OP just got confused over which part was travelling.
There were some planers with travelling gantries, but I don't think any were made in the US like that. They were late entrants, from those Eastern European countries that made all kinds of special, enormous machines, and they were used for work on huge stationary and marine engines. I saw photos of them when I was at American Machinist but I never saw one in the US.
Because once he said "30 foot travel," I knew it wasn't a shaper. And having watched big planers at work, machining lathe beds, it wouldn't be hard to get confused over which part was travelling.
They don't make shapers with 30 feet of travel, Lloyd. They never did. And what would the "bridge-like affair" be, if it was a shaper?
Ed Huntress fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
A traveler. In the Valejo shipyards, I saw a shaper once where the work sat flat on a twin-bed affair like a lathe bed. The cutter traveled UNDER the bed, on a separate set of ways between the two work-bed surfaces.
I don't know what it was (brand, etc), except it was a shaper. It might have been custom-built for the Navy. But it was long, the work laid flat, and the tooling moved UNDER the work.
The way it was built, it could've been 100 feet long (or a mile), and it still would've worked just the same.
If I had to cut a blind keyway, I'd probably be able to find a shop with a ram-type EDM a lot faster than I'd find one with a shaper. d8-)
Seriously, the question Iggy asked is how you would make money with a shaper. Waiting for blind-hole keyway-cutting jobs to show up is not a way to make money.
As for squaring mold bases, the only way that makes sense is if you're the customer for the mold bases and the shaper can make them faster than you need them. In other words, you're making molds and you own the shaper.
Oh, jeez. So what was it doing, cutting shapes, or planing surfaces?
I think you're stretching the term, although I'd have to see that one to make a point about what to call it. As I said, there have been some traveling-gantry planers made, and they were planing long, straight surfaces, like a conventional planer. If that machine you're describing is doing the same, I'd call it a planer.
But I'd have to see the workpieces.
Why are you calling it a shaper, if it's planing long surfaces?
Here's an old traveling-head planer (page 1074):
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Here's another one:
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The terms for these machines were once based on the kind of work they do: planing, analagous to planing wood, and cutting out shapes. There were also traveling-head shapers as well as traveling-head planers; the traveling head on a shaper was intended for a different purpose, however, as the "traveling" was along a horizontal axis. It allowed the shaper to cut wider workpieces. If you go 'way back in time, there were all kinds of configurations.
Anyway, whatever the OP saw, it was a planer if it had 30 feet of travel. That's not for cutting out shapes. It's for planing long ways, cylinder heads, bending-brake tooling, and, probably the primary uses in the really old days, cutting a variety of things for the railroad and marine-equipment industries that required long straight cuts.
rig up insulating tool holder and use mill. Slow but price is right. You can use hex or spline key as electrode to burn internal hex or spline to size. Article shows lash-up using drawer slide and all-thread for vertical movement.
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for fancier dedicated machine see
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---------- Arnold Gregrich in Home Shop Machinist (October/November
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