Fellows gear shapers

Anyone have any info on these beasts? I've got the opportunity to pick up 3 of them cheap, but the combined weight is about 6 tonnes. A 6A, another 6A with rack cutter and a 7. The 6A can apparently handle gears to 18" OD and the 7 gears to 8" OD. About 4' for the rack cutter. Old machines and dirty but in good order.
I don't really have any jobs in mind for them but the price might be very right and I can probably find somewhere to put them when I get the new shop built. Owner is a 70 y/o guy closing up shop and selling all his tools. This is in Australia. I've told him to list all the small stuff on Ebay, we'll see if he does.
I've done a Q&D Google search, BTW.
PDW

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They are completely useless without the "smaller stuff", IE the cutting tools.......

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Yeah but he's got all that stuff, too, it comes as part of the package. 8 DP and down. What I've read is the machines are worth a lot more than I'm willing to pay, but maybe not right here & now. Shrug. We're talking a total of 7 tonnes of cast iron here, with 3 machines. I just shipped 6 tonnes of tools out of my Sydney shop this morning, not real anxious to do it again. I'll wait & see how the pricing pans out, if they're going for scrap I'll grab them but if they're going to a shop which can really use them, I'll pass.
Being able to do internal gears simply would be cool but I have a slotter with rotary table so there's another way.
Thanks for the feedback.
PDW

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 14:51:40 +0100, Peter Wiley
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Ive worked on a few of them. Marvelous gear hobbers. They do use a bastard change gear with a triangular hole in the middle so gears are a bit hard to find, but it sounds like the fellow probably has a full compliment.
I can turn you on to a client of mine in So. California with a shop full of them, who might be able to help you with manuals, set ups and so forth
Action Gear & Broaching (949) 645-8212 1717 Monrovia Ave Costa Mesa, CA 92627 "Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.
Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

Wow, I'm surprised someone is making gears with shapers... I thought it would be too time consuming to do, well, almost any thing with a shaper. I'd think he's use a horizontal mill or something for gears. I'll admit, though, on this subject my ignorance is vast... Is there some special reason for using a shaper for gear hobbing?

snipped-for-privacy@rgs.uci.edu wrote:
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A 'gear shaper' is a machine specialized for making gears and is not at all similar to either a horizontal or vertical general-purpose shaper. While there are ways to make gears on a regular shaper, it is slower than on a mill just as you imagined.

I think they can make bevel gears with properly tapered teeth, unlike a milling machine, also gears with carefully optimized custom depth and pressure angle [mumble, mumble].
JimW

snipped-for-privacy@rgs.uci.edu wrote:
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What Fred said. To elaborate, it rotates the gear blank and the cutter simultaneously (and slowly), while stroking the cutter up and down. The cutters look sort of like gears themselves, except the face is dished to give it rake, and the teeth angle back to give it relief.
Hobs are faster, but have a limitation: If you have a small gear and a large gear on the same blank, you can get the two gears only so close before the hob starts rubbing on the large part of the blank. A shaper cutter can cut the smaller gear even when the two gears are almost right on top of each other. For gearbox design, the less space between the two gears, the smaller you can make the gearbox.
--Glenn Lyford