RobCox
Member
- Messages
- 391
- Location
- Cambridge, UK
In the course of making some bench vice soft jaws on my shaper I decided that it would be nice to have a vertical auto feed on the machine to enable the ends of pieces of stock to be cleaned up. The alternatives to manually feeding the tool slide down stroke by stroke would be to stand the work up in the vice (this just wouldn't end well) or head to the mill. Why not do the whole thing on the mill you ask... well, because I like playing with the shaper from time to time. It's slow but you don't get the horrid swirly patters that a vertical mill gives you and it makes a nice change from using the horizontal mill.
From what I can gather most 10M shapers came without the vertical feed. It was an optional extra and there's a diagram in the manual showing the parts required:
The cross slide has a ready made bore to accept the stub axle 7 above:
In this picture I've already stripped off the auto feed mechanism which lives on the upper of the two shafts here.
First task was to accurately measure the distance between the shaft centres to determine what DP gears would be appropriate, so I found a piece of 3/4" bar to fit in the hole and made some careful measurements. It turns out that both of the two shaft centres in the above picture are exactly the same distance from the centre of the hole for the stub axle and doing some calculation revealed that the axle spacing would suit a total of 54 teeth of 14DP gears, so I ordered a couple of cutters (as an aside, I looked afterwards at the cost of buying ready made gears and found I was quids in making them myself, plus I've got the cutters for the future).
I made a new ratchet wheel and bushing to carry it as I didn't want to mess up the original - none of the changes I've made to this machine are irreversible. About half the parts were turned from chunks of rusty scrapbinium. The bushing was turned separately from the ratchet wheel and the two shrink fitted together:
Here's the new one before the teeth were cut next to the original which appears to have been made in the same way:
and this is where it fits in the ratchet pawl casting:
The collar to the left normally retains it in the casting but will be replaced with a gear. Next the teeth were cut on the mill with a 3/32 slitting saw, dimensions copied from the original:
Next, the gears were cut. I went for a 30T and a 24T to make up the 54T total. The diagram in the manual shows the driving gear to be slightly bigger than the driven gear and in hindsight this was the correct choice as a 27T - 27T combination would not allow the driven gear to be removed from its shaft without dismantling everything (the driven gear swaps between shafts depending on whether you want vertical or side to side feed). Once the gears were cut, I tried them for fit:
I'd already roughed out an axle here. A lot of the exact dimensions were made up on the fly. The gears were a bit tight so I took a shaving off the smaller gear (twice - I didn't relieve it enough the first time). Here's the gear being set up on the arbor to have the tooth gap exactly top centre:
The cutter could then be set just above the dedendum and touched off both sides, using the DRO half function to put it bang on centre.
The axle had an oil passage drilled down the centre and a cross hole drilled halfway from the top, then a groove milled along the journal where the ratchet bush rides. This is all steel on steel, just like the original and needs plenty of oil to stop it wearing out:
To be continued...
From what I can gather most 10M shapers came without the vertical feed. It was an optional extra and there's a diagram in the manual showing the parts required:
The cross slide has a ready made bore to accept the stub axle 7 above:
In this picture I've already stripped off the auto feed mechanism which lives on the upper of the two shafts here.
First task was to accurately measure the distance between the shaft centres to determine what DP gears would be appropriate, so I found a piece of 3/4" bar to fit in the hole and made some careful measurements. It turns out that both of the two shaft centres in the above picture are exactly the same distance from the centre of the hole for the stub axle and doing some calculation revealed that the axle spacing would suit a total of 54 teeth of 14DP gears, so I ordered a couple of cutters (as an aside, I looked afterwards at the cost of buying ready made gears and found I was quids in making them myself, plus I've got the cutters for the future).
I made a new ratchet wheel and bushing to carry it as I didn't want to mess up the original - none of the changes I've made to this machine are irreversible. About half the parts were turned from chunks of rusty scrapbinium. The bushing was turned separately from the ratchet wheel and the two shrink fitted together:
Here's the new one before the teeth were cut next to the original which appears to have been made in the same way:
and this is where it fits in the ratchet pawl casting:
The collar to the left normally retains it in the casting but will be replaced with a gear. Next the teeth were cut on the mill with a 3/32 slitting saw, dimensions copied from the original:
Next, the gears were cut. I went for a 30T and a 24T to make up the 54T total. The diagram in the manual shows the driving gear to be slightly bigger than the driven gear and in hindsight this was the correct choice as a 27T - 27T combination would not allow the driven gear to be removed from its shaft without dismantling everything (the driven gear swaps between shafts depending on whether you want vertical or side to side feed). Once the gears were cut, I tried them for fit:
I'd already roughed out an axle here. A lot of the exact dimensions were made up on the fly. The gears were a bit tight so I took a shaving off the smaller gear (twice - I didn't relieve it enough the first time). Here's the gear being set up on the arbor to have the tooth gap exactly top centre:
The cutter could then be set just above the dedendum and touched off both sides, using the DRO half function to put it bang on centre.
The axle had an oil passage drilled down the centre and a cross hole drilled halfway from the top, then a groove milled along the journal where the ratchet bush rides. This is all steel on steel, just like the original and needs plenty of oil to stop it wearing out:
To be continued...