A Keats angle plate made on a shaper

[ieezitin]

Well!. I have had my shaper for about a year now and I have over time fixed up what’s been abused on this little machine. It’s a Atlas 7 B from the sixties or there about’s.

 I do not have a vertical mill only a small horizontal mill and I need a Keats angle plate for my lathe and the horizontal would struggle to make the Keats so I am putting this shaper to work for what it is truly suited to do. 

I am a little rusty on using the shaper ( its been 25 odd years or so ) and I have rushed through this project and have already have made mistakes but I am confident I will get there in the end.

I scratched out a design on a small note pad and tore into the fab shop at work and devoured some angle and flat plate and welded together the base of the clamp. Here are a few shots of the roughed out piece and some first roughing out on the machine tool.






A shaper is legendary for the surface finish it produces. With very little effort and some small HSS tool bits ground by hand on a grinder I got some very handsome finishes indeed.





I planed the back of the clamp first so I could use this as a datum point for future machining. From this point I would be able to get vertical and square. Well that was my intension.







The rest of the shots are of me trying to get the two 45 faces on the clamp. I have trouble keeping it a true 90 from the table surface,  the way I have it clamped it wants to bow in both X & Y. I have to make some small modifications to my clamping arrangement to hold it correct. A new set of pictures will follow on how I manage that.

Also the rest of the shots are a great reference for those who are new to machining on holding work and how important it is to have every direction covered for misalignment and movement while ripping off steel especially on a shaper which is quite forceful in its action,

















To sum up, the 25 year lap in using this machine shows quite frankly. But I had fun anyway. My design is wrong too! And there are flaws in its future use which will mean I will have to make some small additions to it.  Its amazing that the more problems arise in what you are doing the more your brain just takes over on solves the glitches and the learning curve just shoots through the roof.

Please all are welcome in commenting what you see, any suggestions would be truly appreciated.  I will have more done by next week end to show you all.      God bless    Anthony.

[dsquire]

Anthony.

Looks to be a great job that you are doing. IMHO you always learn while doing most jobs the first few times. There is always a better way, a faster way or maybe just a different way. They can all be right, especially the one that works for you. That is why there are so many tools with the same name yet all are slightly different from each other. At the end of the day you are going to have a Keats Angle plate that works for you. Keep up the great work Anthony.
 

Cheers 

Don

[Rob.Wilson]

Hi Anthony

Looks great to me    there nothing wrong with a design evolving  as work progresses 

I like the way you used a Vee block to hold the clamp bar for machining , i was pondering how i was going to tackle  that job myself ,,, now i no 


Rob

[doubleboost]

Some nice tig welding 
I think i need a shaper 
John

[ieezitin]

Don.
Your right! And my Keats I shall have.

Rob.
The v-block works but you have to support the ears underneath with nuts so you don’t bend the main body or as you can see with the following pictures I supported the ears with adjustable parallels.

John.
I don’t care what anyone says, on a limited home shop machinist budget a shaper is more of an investment and an asset than plowing a lot of money in a quality Bridgeport and feeding it tooling and accessories. Don’t get me wrong I covet a decent milling machine, but floor space and power limit me slightly.  Buy a shaper and you will never look back, the tooling is pennies and I believe it’s a little more versatile. The only drawback is time with a shaper it is without a doubt a lot slower but ten times more fun!.


So here we have the apex groove scribed and a slot needs to follow.





And here is the slot machined. I done this with a lathe parting off tool and just slid it from right to left I really did not care about it being true to square I just wanted the slot.




Here are other shots of the clamp being supported. This complete set up took 2 hours. I had to dig for hardware and scratch out parallels to tweak it into place. Then my shaper started to have problems, there is a bump and a clang in the drive train so work has stopped until I find the problem.












Thats all    Anthony

[ieezitin]

Well I fixed the clanging it was the brass block that slides up the vertical ram lever arm it just got loose.

While making this angle plate I was wishing that I had a quick way that I could square off the part I am trying to machine, you can slide a parallel in the t-slots and square off that or even just use your tri-square from the base but it’s a strain on the eyes and a PIA.

So before I complete this job I threw together some material and whipped up a semi-permanent 90 deg angle stop-brace square- do-dad thingy.







Here it is fully machined and still left on the table.





And here it is installed. Now I can either use it on the left or the right of the table. It comes up square on X Y & Z









Now this really was an investment of time. For just about all stuff that needs to be machined on the table I can use the stop for square. If I needed it dead nuts on I would use the clock to find where I am and shim accordingly other than that it’s a gem I am very happy with it.

Anthony.

[Rob.Wilson]

Hi Anthony


I like that stop idea    ,cracking finish too ,   ,,,,,, I have a few ideas to make life easier setting things up on the shaper 


Rob

[Dean W]

Very nice, Anthony.  Looking at some of those silky finished surfaces would have anyone dreaming of a shaper!