Folks -
I've been sitting over here in the corner listening for a while now, and finally came across something that might be of interest.
I recently bought a shaper. A 7" Delta/Rockwell shaper from 1952. It's in pretty decent shape and my goal is to get it running and reasonably accurate.
It is missing the motor setup, though. Originally, these shapers came with a 1/3 HP, 1725 RPM AC motor that ran a jackshaft (with about a 3:1 speed reduction as part of it) and then had a stepped pulley arrangement to provide four speeds for input to the bull gear. I'm missing basically everything in the "Shaper Motor Arrangement" picture (attached, I hope!)
So.... I guess I COULD try to find all that stuff, but frankly, I'm not interested in "restoration", I just want this thing to make chips so that I can figure out how a shaper works and what it's good for. As a result, my plan is to simply mount a VFD motor on the bench behind the machine, line it up with the input pulley and go for it.
Since I'm missing the 3:1 speed reduction, though, I was thinking of using a DC motor with a speed control here to improve low-RPM torque (also, looks like it's a little cheaper than an AC/VFD solution of a similar size.) My problem is that I'm not that familiar with the technology and wanted to check - do AC and DC motors "cross over"? (In other words, should I be looking for a DC motor of 1/3 HP ish? Bigger? Smaller?) Any tricks about buying DC motors for VFD usage I should know about? (I know that "inverter duty" AC motors are more expensive... is it the same in DC?)
What do you folks think?
Thanks in advance!