J. A. Vance Planer/Matcher Restoration: Cutting the First Chips!

hello Keith Rucker here at vintage machinery org so today we're going to hopefully finally try to get this cleaner matcher up and running I was going to try to do this last Saturday and came out here and went through the machine made a bunch of fine adjustments and got everything old up and got it ready to go and we have to get my tractor which we're going to power it with and the museum had hauled the tractor off to a big show that they go to every year and they had it on exhibit at the show and it wasn't here at the museum so we're back out here today they've hauled the tractor back we've got it hooked up and actually was running it just a few minutes ago making sure everything was running well and it looks like it is and we're about ready to go so a couple little comments before we get started with this because it seems like every time I do anything with the planer matcher I get all kinds of comments from you guys like oh that looks dangerous well guess what it is this machine yes it will eat you alive if you're not careful around it but you know people worked around this kind of machinery back in the day ten hours a day 12 hours a day seven days a week and most of them did so without having serious injury I'm sure that there were accidents but quite honestly back in those days in my opinion of the people that were working around equipment like this they took a little bit more personal responsibility than people do today and they tend to take care of themselves a bit better and didn't count on someone else to do that for them now I'm not saying that safety and so forth isn't important it is and I'm glad that we work in environments today that are much safer but this is what they work with this is a museum that represents the 1890s and 1910 and this is period correct for that time period and it's one of the things that we show around here so if it looks dangerous to you don't do it at home that's my advice so with that we'll do a walk around and kind of show you what all we did to get this ready to go so again we got our little John Deere B this is a 1941 John Deere bead that were powering this off of the power take-off or the flat belt takeoff there we got our brand new belt that was donated to the museum by one of our viewers up in Canada and this appears to be working good at least when we test it out of course that hooks up to the jack shaft on the back which all the belts go up to the Machine and I show you a couple of things we've done so number one right here we got this little board in here and what this is it's just kind of little feather board to put some pressure up against the board that you're feeding in so the board's going to come up against this fence and as the board's going in this actually allows the operator back here to put some pressure of it's starting to go in cricket or whatever to get that board lined up going in there right and I've got it set up right now for those someone by force which is what we're going to probably work on today got all new belts all the way around we've got our feed rollers here set where they should hopefully grip that we'll probably have to fine-tune that once we get started we'll pull the board's through still don't have my knives on yet I want to actually run some boards through this thing without cutting anything before we start putting knives on they will probably start putting knives on one head at a time and just kind of work our way up and then of course the board will come back out the back here and again we've got this set up for about a 1 by 4 and you know it's not it's loose in here it's not real tight so but it's is tight enough to keep that board in line but you know there's probably I don't know quarter to a half inch of play in here when the board comes out this side you know we got everything old up everything freed up everything's ready to go so let's fire the tractor up and get this thing spinning we've got a rough-cut 1 by 4 and again now I'm doing is just making sure lieutenant he's through properly the door here to push it up against the fish so we're ready to go ahead and put some knives on here the way this top cutter is we're going to this top cutter head first the way this top cutter head is you can't get the bolts into the t-slot without taking one of the end caps off so we're going to take off one of the bearing caps down here and they'll give us access and then we'll put some put some bolts in there and go ahead and get that first up knife bolted down alright pull that off temporarily and no more nuts yeah he's 35 nuts up right here just put we're gonna put five bolts in here because that's how many of this knife takes all right I got your fiber nuts lined up all right give me that ball knife there all right okay you bought yep yeah give me some nuts here's one here's a left huh yeah I need to probably go find something real quick I'll give you the next two I'm just kind of getting it on here right now we're gonna set it here in just a little bit yeah I'm just snugging these right now we're going to actually have to just hype these blades here in another step so all right guys we're going to go ahead and get these knives on now and I almost forgot that I got some washers that need to go in between these and I wouldn't got those cleaned up so I'm just going to go ahead and put those on first and just for the record I have laid the two knives and they are the same weight we want this to be balanced and then the washers and the nuts nuts are all are the bolts and nuts are all pretty much the same weight they're all done on a CNC machine and then these washers that I'm putting on here that they're they're matched on each side so that everything will stay in balance so let's get the washers on and then we're going to set the knife so these are all finger tight right now and what I'm going to do to set the knives is I've got a little block of wood it's just a piece of quarter-inch plywood it's actually just a tad less than a quarter of an inch and we're going to do is lay it on to the head and make the knife just flush with this you know we want the knives to project the same on both sides and let me go grab my little lead hammer or I can knock that around that's pretty darn close right there maybe just a little bit proud on this side yeah I'm going to double-check that that looks good so let's tighten these up all right we're going to rotate this around now and get the other side come on say this why be fine just a touch more right there all right we'll put the bearing cap back on and we should be ready to go all right guys we've got our knives bolted down it should be ready to go it was tighten here working on this but we got the pressure plate back here where it the board should clear up underneath the pressure plate but yet it's going to be pretty close and that's going to help everything here anyway I think we're ready to go so we're going to fire this thing up and I see we can make some chips fly huh ride that train all day long your ride our compound hi guys we got knives on this thing engage the keyboard keep your fingers crossed all right yes after the first cut we got a little small problem it's nothing huge nothing we can't deal with but I want to kind of show you what we're dealing with here so if you look you see a little groove right here if we didn't have the knife the cutter head down quite far enough to clean it up which is fine too we're fine-tuning it right now I see this little groove that's in here that's where the the bolt heads are actually hitting the wood as it's going around and it's real easy to fix that basically what you guys you got a cutting circle and the cutting circle right now is not big enough for the bolt heads to clear so what we need to do is we need to actually extend our knives out we've got about a quarter of an inch I probably need to go I don't know 3/8 of an inch out and that should increase the cutting circle and then that should also give me the clearance from my bolts here so we're going to go back over to the head we're going to find us a new shim that's a little bit thicker and we'll adjust that and then we'll come back and feed the board back through and try it again all right we're going to make another pass at it I'm beautifully playing board all right handsome man looking good guys there's a handful of chips came off of this rough board we're playing down nice and smooth very happy so we're going to add another set of knives I put the bottom head on this time it's going to be a little bit of a pain because we don't have to crawl under the machine to do it so you probably won't see it on camera but we'll go ahead it's the same process that we just did so we got the bottom knives on now and they bolted on the same way in this case though this head is not adjustable up and down like the other one the other one we can adjust the thickness this one here what we have to do we actually put some parallels on here that were an eighth inch high and measured across the top of this this should be taking one eighth of an inch of cut and both knives are set to the same height so we're going to do this again I got the pressure plate up here I raise the dust week getting here will lower that back down and we should be ready to go for another round of this and hopefully we'll have the clearance on these because we don't know what we're going to do I can't adjust those out much hi here we go this boards already been played on the top alright guys that's the bottom side again looks good we got a little fine adjusting to do to get it just set just right having checked my thickness yet but that's easy enough to work out we're planing two sides of the board's and making good progress so only two side heads to go alright guys so that would be a wrap for today we got the top and bottom heads running I want to thank my assistants today mr. Brian Fitzgerald spin out here helping us he's excited to see this thing run aren't you brought yes sir how long you been waiting to see this machine run two years yeah he's been ready he's when we found out he's going to run it he said I'm going over there with you and then Mike Wiggins has also been out here with me today again Mike well we were doing the broaching job earlier and now he's out here helping me with this and he came down from Statesboro if you haven't already Mike's got a good a YouTube channel backyard machine shop yep so obviously shop go check it out he's got some good on machine shop stuff on there too we're going to have two nothing they're putting the Train in right now we're at the end of the day so we're going to have to come back and get the side heads running but that should be fairly easy after these so we're halfway there probably over halfway because the side head should be a lot easier thank you guys for watching and we'll check you later have a good day here comes a train

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 144,111

Rating: 4.9500299 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Woodworking, Planer, John Deere, Suqare Head, Flat Belt, Steam Engine, Line Shaft

Id: bFOwx6_4M5g

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/incrediblywittyname]

that kid made my day. he is my woodworking spirit animal.