by Barry Young

Machines are expensive. Dust is abrasive. Don’t believe me? Go get that old motorcycle helmet that Aunt Beunice gave you for your 16^th birthday after you bought that 125cc Honda Combat Wombat with your paper route money. Yeah, the snazzy lime green one. See all that dust on the face shield? Give it a good rub and telephone me to tell me it didn’t scratch it up.

You keep your calipers and micrometers in a toolbox right? Those baseball cards that Grampa gave you go into his footlocker right? You keep your money in a bank right? So what do you do with your machinery? If you are like ninety nine percent of amateur machinists you let your machinery sit out in the open, unprotected, cold and lonely.

Next time you are using foul language to describe to a friend how your machine wouldn’t hold the tolerance you wanted it to, look back at how you treated the poor machine. You oughta be ashamed. Why would you put the bench grinder where it would spit abrasive particles onto the lathe? You mean you did woodworking in the same room as your metal machines are stored? Don’t you know that wood chips will soak up all the oil on those precision surfaces and make them rub together? The precision of your machinery is based on the wear that occurs to the ways and other sliding surfaces. So when you are done hanging your head, when your lip stops quivering, I will help you pay your penance. Even you can seek forgiveness at the chapel of the recovering machine abuser.

The only way to fix up your Karma is to make covers for your machinery. Yeah, a lathe cozy. This sounds dumb until you think about it. Like “Don’t run with the scissors,” sounded dumb until you either thought about it or found out why people told you that. This is the same, you can learn the easy way through logic or you can poo poo the idea and pay when your machines will no longer do what they should. I finally got sick of waiting for February 30^th which is when my wife said she would finish my equipment covers and asked her to show me how to sew fabric. This she was perfectly willing to do. It was not that hard to learn. We measured the extreme length, width and height of my Atlas horizontal milling machine and she made a sort of toaster cover shaped thing that fit like snot because the mill was not a perfect cube. Scratching my head I thought up a better way. That is what this article is about.

I took a cheap blue tarp and threw it over the mill. Everywhere there was looseness in the tarp got a row of pins. Eventually the tarp fit it snugly. I cut away all the excess tarp and cut nice and even around the base. Voila! We had made a pattern. We took it into the sewing room and laid cotton duck (fabric) down on the floor and laid the “pattern” over it. Dang! The fabric was too narrow. No Problem, We sewed on an extra ten inches and now it was wide enough. We pinned the pattern to the material, traced around it with a Sharpie marker and cut it out. She showed me how to sew the seams  which was WAY easier than I thought. I had her sew (hem) a piece of clothesline around the base of the cover and it was done. Yay! It fit all the curves and odd surfaces of the mill. It literally was a custom made cover.

Next came the Atlas 7-inch shaper. I decided to document the process and do all of it by myself.  Here are photos of the goofy shape that needed a cover

It is an ungainly thing to try to cover.

Under the tarp it looked like an ostrich trying not to be seen.

See that big flap ‘o nonsense hanging off the front? That is the excess we are trying to get rid of. Gathering all the excess material together then pinning it to isolate extra fabric leads to rows of straight pins pinching off whatever you want to get rid of like this.

Once the excess is pinned you can carve away the extra fabric OUTSIDE the pins with scissors leaving you something better looking like this.

Be sure to write on it before you take it off so that the outside is obvious. Otherwise the seams will show and your buddies will laugh even harder at you. When you trim away the bottom of the cover level with the floor it suddenly looks like a machine cover.

Now the pins can come out and you have a pattern. Lay this on the fabric you have chosen. You can see how I had to add material to get the width problem mentioned above solved.

Trace around the pattern and cut out the fabric. Sew up the seams and sew in the cord around the bottom. You now have custom fit machine covers. In this last photo you can see the incognito shaper on the left before the cord is sewn in around the bottom and the incognito milling machine on the right with the cord sewn in. The cord gives the cover a finished appearance so don’t be an idiot and leave it out.

That’s it! If you have a question or you want to leave a comment please click the “Join the forum discussion on this post” link below to log into the forum topic tied to this post.

- Barry

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Material: Cast Iron (Castings) and Steel
Units: (in)

This set of vintage plans was loaned to me by a friend who has had them for many (30+) years. The plans are for a “Six Inch Stroke Bench Crank Shaper” from the Pootatuck Corporation of Stratford Connecticut. However, I can’t seem to find any information about them online. The plans are old enough that I believe they are no longer protected under copyright. If this is not the case, please let me know and I will remove them.

Also, if anyone has any information about this shaper, including pictures or videos of a completed version of this shaper, please post them to the forum.

Which reminds me, for those of you who haven’t heard, projectsinmetal.com has a new forum! The new forum will allow users to communicate with each other more easily and provides a simple way for visitors to share pictures of their projects, ask and answer questions, etc. The forum is free, so please take a moment to register via the “Forum” tab at the top of the page.

One more thing, it looks as though someone used to supply castings for this shaper. If anyone is still supplying castings, please let us know by posting the information to the forum. If not, this might be a good casting project for the furnace my friend Barry is building. Also, if you’d be interested in buying castings for the shaper, please leave a comment below or on the forum.

  Six_Inch_Stroke_Bench_Crank_Shaper_by_Pootatuck_Corp.pdf (7.1 MiB, 1,496 hits)
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If you’re a clockmaker (or have some other need for cutting precision gears) and you don’t want to spend $8K on a quality Burgeon, take a look at Michel’s detailed plans. FYI, the plans are in French (for example, the index plate pin is called a “pointeau”), but that shouldn’t prevent anyone from being able to read the dimensions (which are metric).

“This is milling machine for clockmaking that I designed for use with a Dremel. This machine is based on a milling machine from the Bergeon company. The goal was not to duplicate the Bergeon design exactly, but rather to alter the design to allow for the use of a Dremel. A lightweight Dremel is easy to mount thus avoiding the need for a larger motor and pulley (like in the Burgeon design). On my site you will find photographs as well as the method of construction.

Also on my site there are other projects which might be of interest to your visitors: A quick change tool post that I designed which has proved to be very handy, as well as a stainless marking gauge, which was a very beautiful project to create.

-  Michel”

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