140mower
Don
Truer words have never been spoken....... That being said, when time is on your side it's time well spent. And with a sharp shear tool and a light cut you would almost think it had been ground....
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New to me Ammco 7" Metal shaper
- Thread starter Susquatch
- Start date
Exactly! You can do with REALLY cheap tooling, what would cost you a great deal more, if you wanted to use a Mill or other tools.
If you want to go fast, use another tool. If you are okay with slow speed, you can get it done, eventually, for pennies!
mickeyf
Super User
If you start to understand the so-called 'optimum' speeds and feeds, take a note that they are designed for a commercial shop to strike the balance between money spent, and money earned, not about making the best possible finishes, or the least risky set-ups.
Shapers in a Hobby environment, have no need to be run balls-to-the-wall, and in truth, trying to push the speeds and feed up to what is considered commercially viable, has long since proven to be a money-loser for most commercial shops. Which is to say, there is a reason they claim that you can make anything with a Shaper, except a living!
Slower cuts put less wear on the machinery and tooling (as cheap as it is, it's kinda nice to preserve it for use again later).
And, you don't have to ensure it is all bolted down to the Continental Shield in order to be sure it will still be sitting in the same corner of the shop when done...
If ya gots a Missus, ask her if slow, comfortable and smooth is alright, vs. trying to ride a jackhammer every time!
Seriously, slow is OK. I pretty much guarantee that you will spend more time obsessing over the set-up and planning, of the cut, than you will actually cutting. As much as I am a fan of time efficiency, this is not a place to rush things. Nor is it the tool that you would pick, if time, truly, was of the essence.
I don't disagree with any of this. I think what I was trying to say was that many people are under the impression that a shaper is necessarily slow and incapable of running ...um..briskly, which ain't quite the case. Whether it's always appropriate or a good idea is another question.
I thought you set the cutter so that would happen to the work piece where the next stroke would go so as to not mar the surface finish.
I have the DoAll bandsaw but not a horizontal saw. As such I am not familiar with how fast or slow they are. I bought a power hacksaw a month back and I don't really know if it's fast or slow either. I load it and go and do something else, it beats me every time. Lovin it.
I used to freak out the other guys in my shop, because I would weld up a, essentially, wood bandsaw blade, and then proceed to go to town on thick aluminum plate with it. Usually 3000-5000 Feet per second speeds, like, right at the top speeds the saw could handle! I would use the same 3-4 TPI blades for cutting thin sheet (use a layer of plywood under, to support the material. Learn to not gronk the material into the teeth, and you get a pretty good surface finish!
My record, for a "stupid-strike" was while I was returning the coil of blade material to it's storage (less than three steps away!), one of the idiots in my shop decided he needed to cut a piece of crappy angle iron, so he did that with the brand new blade I had just made... Double stupid, since we actually HAD an Ironworker, in the shop! <spit>
Downwindtracker2
Super User
The bigger bandsaws come with their own welders.
Tom O
Ultra Member
My son has done the same
I found another free motor today. This one is a blower motor. It uses a start winding and a centrifugal switch and has no capacitors. I'm hoping it has enough oomph to get going against the shaper inertia. We will see.
A few questions. The motor direction is not spelled out in the manual. I assume the motor direction has to be such that the quick motion is the return stroke. But maybe one of you guys has an AMMCO 7 and knows which way it should turn.
And about what size should the motor pulley on this thing be?
Yeah, the forward (power) stroke is at the 'top' of the arm inside the shaper, and the return is much faster as that occurs on the 'bottom' side of the arm. Best mechanical advantage for each use!
You can either do the math, based on the strokes per minute in the manual. or you can likely just grab a pulley that 'looks about right', and it probably will be (unless you have delusions of grandeur!).
Like I said before in this thread, shapers is a slow motion process, without much to be gained from pushing things harder than they need to be... Set-up/planning is gonna eat the time, and you cannot ever make a shaper work fast enough to gain that back. Shrug your shoulders, and accept that as reality!
