Gingery Metal ShaperAuthor: Dave Date: 11.05.10 - 8:11am Back when I was in my early to mid 20s I got the bug to make a Gingery Metal Shaper. For those who dont know, a metal shaper is one of the early style machine tools developed that allows you to plane flate surfaces. It works by holding a toolbit in a holder attached to a ram. As the ram moves forward and back, the toolbit scrapes and peels off layers of metal by sheer brute force. Mechanical assemblies attached to teh bull wheel, advance a rachet wheel every revolution and slide the table a hair each stroke. The toolbit is also held in a clapper block, so that on the back stroke, the toolbit can flip up slightly and will not be dragged forceably against the work on the return stroke. (which occurs after the table has advanced). Here is a video of one in action (not mine) The operator can set:
I wish i had pictures of the foundry fired up and working with the molds and molten aluminum. It was pretty awesome (albeit dangerous). So all the aluminum pieces you see in the pictures below were hand cast by me. They are from an old car transmission I tore apart and broke in to pieces to fit into the melting pot. Here is a youtube video of a guy with the charcole furnace, little long, just jump to the middle/end if you want to see the action This project probably took me a year of hobby time to create. Learned a lot of things in the process. I actually never really have used the machine which is sad to say..just a little here and there. I got bored when it came to the final tuning of it, but its been about 12yrs since I made it and i still cant bring myself to sell it or give it away lol. The major modifications i did from the original design was changing it over from a chain drive to a gear drive. I was lucky enough to have access to a full sized milling machine at teh time to do the critical spacing of the holes. The gears are from an old motorcycle engine. The main gear had large holes machined in teh center and offered no place to bolt the bull wheel slide used to change the length of the stroke. If you look close you will see how i remedied this. I used the gear as a steel core and poured molten aluminum into it to give me a mounting surface lol. Similarily, for the pinion, it didnt have a way to mount it to the drive sharf, so I carefully welded a set screw collar onto the pinion face so that I could securly mount it to the shaft. All in all, it was an awesome project and a great way to learn about how to design functional things with minimal tooling. Old school shop tricks have been lost in teh day and age of precision (expensive) tooling, but I would argue they are much more pure and actually do more to develop skill and forethought than todays mentality of "oghh i cant do that without a $20,000 machine". Casting your own metal parts is an extremely powerful capability. You can generate complex shapes that you could never machine and its as simple as building/carving them out of wood, packing sand around them, and pouring in metal.     Comments: (1)On 02.03.11 - 3:05pm Brian Smith wrote:
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