Scraping the shaper

[J Tiers]

So I have this Atlas shaper that has needed work for quite a while. Pieces of it have been sitting on my primary bench for too long, and now I have to get it off of there because I need to do work on a long lathe part... I need the space.

best thing to do is finish scraping the %$#! thing so I don't have to bring it back later.

Got the ram and ram ways in process now, forgot to take any in-process pics, because this is a 'get it outta here" job. But remembered recently.

Ram surfaces finished


Ram ways in column finished as to horizontal, but still have the guide way to finish.



Looking ahead, I did an "x" test on the vertical column ways, and it was pretty comical......... you can barely see what is making contact, and it was even a fairly "wet" bluing of the test straightedge. Some serious issues to correct there. And that's in addition to getting it accurately perpendicular to the ram ways, which I have not yet done more than a visual check on. That visual check looked pretty OK though.


I might have more than I want to do to this thing..... but at least it's all box ways.....

[Jaakko Fagerlund]

Fly cut it first to have something resembling a flat surface?

[1935Ron]

looks great !

[J Tiers]

Fly cut it first to have something resembling a flat surface?

Wonderful idea, but I don't have a big enough horizontal mill to do it. Shoveling off the material may not be too bad, I've done that before.

Even a little work can make a fair pile of stuff.

This is what came off a small mill column, I was curious so I saved almost all of what was removed.... It was in a similar shape, not flat and in that case also at an angle to the spindle (despite the flaking, which I did not believe in, someone just "oil flaked" it)

[Mark Rand]

I'll agree with the fair amount of stuff, Calculating from the volume removed, I took off over a pound of scrapings from the to of my mill table as the first part of scraping it true (10x48" table was hogged by .010"!)


On the shaper, it's worth getting the vertical ways of the column and table flat and square to the ram ways because of the grief that comes with the table not being consistently parallel to the ram. Poor contact on the ways ends up in more movement when taking heavy cuts, which ends up in more wear, etc.


Congratulations on the work so far and commiserations for the work to come

[J Tiers]

I did find one of the ram in progress.

One side of the slide partway into the scraping. It's better than when it started, but there is still no contact whatever at the nose end of the ram. It's hard to see in the picture, but the very rightmost end has essentially no blue on it.


The actual nose will be scraped to put the rotating part at a good right angle to the ram ways later. I'm not worried about that yet.

[J Tiers]

It's getting better. I try to get in at least a couple passes every day... I have not had one good long session yet, but its improving.

Spotted with my 9 x 12 "chinese tombstone"... one that has been checked against others and seems decent...



Time to start checking the alignment against the ram ways now.... so both flatness and alignment can be "brought in" together.

[dp]

Are you bluing both sides of the ways together? That looks like when it comes in it's going to come it in a bang. Just a few islands here and there. You can see the bullseye high spots on the right side just below the vertical center point.

Come to think of it - those surfaces are clamping points more than sliding ways on the Atlas shaper - you probably don't need to get all that close unless you're going to use the table lift in contouring operations.

[J Tiers]

The tombstone gets both ways together.

It's early to worry about bullseyes, first there needs to be contact in spots over the full surface, which isn't happening yet. There are "holes" and untouched areas, for instance at the left of the left surface, and the bottoms of both. I have some more "shoveling" to do.

My method is to work for full area first, and sweat the details later. But it's a lot less work if you take notice early of how the alignments are. In this case, original contact of the "x" test was only in a few spots on edges, and quite a lot of material needed to be removed to bring it to this point.

Coming in with a bang? yeah, hopefully.... Unless you are pinpoint spotting for a reference surface, it usually DOES come in fast. You get full area distribution, then a few rounds of spot-splitting, and suddenly you are at 10 to 15 spots per inch. Another good reason to check alinements... you don't want to be trying to adjust an alignment after you have got it to 15 spots....

Yes, it's a clamping surface, but all that means is that the contact may be fewer spots. But if the "ways" are not kept in decent alignment, moving the table will shift the work around and surfaces being worked on may not turn out right in using the device. Plus, there is no reason NOT to keep good alignment, other than wanting to be done... Anyhow, that's how I prefer to do it.