Ed Huntress fired this volley in
:

They don't make shapers with 30 feet of travel, Lloyd. They never did.
And what would the "bridge-like affair" be, if it was a shaper?


A traveler. In the Valejo shipyards, I saw a shaper once where the work
sat flat on a twin-bed affair like a lathe bed. The cutter traveled UNDER
the bed, on a separate set of ways between the two work-bed surfaces.

I don't know what it was (brand, etc), except it was a shaper. It might
have been custom-built for the Navy. But it was long, the work laid
flat, and the tooling moved UNDER the work.

The way it was built, it could've been 100 feet long (or a mile), and it
still would've worked just the same.

Lloyd