On Mon, 13 May 2013 20:49:06 -0500, "Lloyd E. Sponenburgh"
lloydspinsidemindspring.com wrote:

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.

Oh, jeez. So what was it doing, cutting shapes, or planing surfaces?

I think you're stretching the term, although I'd have to see that one
to make a point about what to call it. As I said, there have been some
traveling-gantry planers made, and they were planing long, straight
surfaces, like a conventional planer. If that machine you're
describing is doing the same, I'd call it a planer.

But I'd have to see the workpieces.


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.

Why are you calling it a shaper, if it's planing long surfaces?

Here's an old traveling-head planer (page 1074):

http://tinyurl.com/brzc6vm

Here's another one:

http://tinyurl.com/bu3y6eu



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

The terms for these machines were once based on the kind of work they
do: planing, analagous to planing wood, and cutting out shapes. There
were also traveling-head shapers as well as traveling-head planers;
the traveling head on a shaper was intended for a different purpose,
however, as the "traveling" was along a horizontal axis. It allowed
the shaper to cut wider workpieces. If you go 'way back in time, there
were all kinds of configurations.

Anyway, whatever the OP saw, it was a planer if it had 30 feet of
travel. That's not for cutting out shapes. It's for planing long ways,
cylinder heads, bending-brake tooling, and, probably the primary uses
in the really old days, cutting a variety of things for the railroad
and marine-equipment industries that required long straight cuts.

--
Ed Huntress