Metal Planer Restoration 68: Fine Tuning and Preparing for the First Cut!

[Music] hello keith rucker here at vintagemachinery.org back to working on the metal planer again today guys and i think this is going to be a landmark day for us i think we've got a bunch of our issues worked out when we left off last time we had the table working going back and forth the problem was was that when we came forward there was the stop was running up onto my dog here the dog was running up onto the lever i guess and it was kind of picking the table up and uh i spent some time working off camera working through some things and really i pretty much had a really strong idea what the problem was even before i i stopped that last video i didn't say anything at that time because i just wanted to play with some things but the problem the main problem was was that uh as we've talked about before when this table is cutting it's going in on the stroke it's moving at about 20 feet per minute that's about the speed and that's according to the books and references i have that's a good average speed for a metal planer to run i mean if you can only have a one speed planer that's kind of where the sweet spot where they like to see things running and on the return stroke you are actually moving at a faster pace and the way that my my pulleys and stuff were set up on this thing we were moving about 60 feet per minute which is about three times as fast as uh the the stroke going in the other direction the problem was was that return speed was a little bit too fast and by the time the belt shifted in the direction the table moved because it was moving so fast it was just running it up onto the stop so what was the solution we had to slow down uh the return feed and uh to do that what i ended up doing was i ended up changing this flat belt pulley up here out and i did some math did some calculations i really wanted that return stroke to be about 40 feet per minute rather than 60 slowing it down by about a third and guys that made all the difference so you know when i got this machine it came with the counter shaft it had those two large pulleys on it i'm not exactly sure that that those were even the original pulleys that came with this machine or that ran with this machine but that's that's what came with it i don't know the whole story i don't know why those pulleys are on there but i do know the solution and the solution was simple again we just we just made that pulley on this side a little bit smaller and uh slowed things down considerably and again that seems to be working fortunately i was able to find a pulley up there that was the right size and everything worked out good so there you go we're going to fire this thing up here in a minute and let you guys see it run but it's working much much better now in fact let's just do it i've got my lever more or less straight up which is kind of a neutral position neither of the belts are quite on the drive i can kind of get that position right there to stop everything i'm just going to manually move it forward this is the cut stroke the return stroke is faster but now it's not running up on that stop and i've let this thing cycle quite a few times and it's working really well now i know some people are going to ask about the noise that's just all the open gears inside the plane are running and they're just noisy like this on this type of joint or a plane already [Applause] let's kind of get some shots showing the action going on here so starting out here here's our uh lever and dogs and everything's working real good there now it has not misfired a single time since we slowed things down [Applause] so i got a little bit shot showing here you can see the belt fully shifting or the belt shifting on the pulleys there you can also see the feed works working that's that little lever in between there that's going up and down uh you can crank that crank on the front and adjust the stroke on how far it moves every time it's quite an interesting mechanism let me show you on the back side over here [Applause] all right so watch this arm here it's going to rack up and down and it's connected to a rack that the rack is then connected to a gear that comes over to a little ratchet fall that goes to feed works and this is moving the head left and right and you can adjust the stroke again by changing this uh handle down here [Applause] kind of neat and this gear here is running this screw it'll turn and as that turns it's moving this head either left or right uh in there the way we got it right now i can change this gear around put it on the top contention right now when i do that it moves the head up and down now i've got it moving the head you can see the candle up here turning on each stroke it's actually moving up right now to reverse it i just moved my pile around on that i should be going down now there we go [Applause] so hopefully you can see we got the machine generally speaking it's working right now and it's very very close to making that first cut i do have one little thing i need to do before we do that actually i probably can make a cut right now but there's one thing i haven't done yet that i need to take care of and i think we're gonna go ahead and do that right now but uh this uh whole cross head moves up and down by cranking the crank up or the gears up on the top here um it was set up originally with a pulley that goes over here to this uh these bevel gears we had to make one of those bevel gears they're not even tight right now you see i'm just turning that's turning the shaft it's not turning anything but they have that hooked up on a flat belt pulley where you could use the power to lift it up um i'm not exactly 100 sure how all that's supposed to work though because of you you don't want it going the whole time the the machine's going and i really can't see how you can engage and disengage that it's here but what i think i'm going to do is i'm going to make a little adapter up here that just has a little square shank that i can use a crank and crank it up so if you look you know i've got right here i can move my head left and right i can move my my head up and down let me put that in neutral there we go it can go up and down and what i want to do is make a little adapter here where i can just crank this up and down now normally you're not moving this cross head while the machine's in operation it's one of those things that you set it for the job you're doing and uh you know you can move it up higher and lower to give clearance for your work up underneath it but once you kind of get it roughly where you want you can move your cutter up and down by using the hand wheel here and if you're doing a flat surface it's just going to go left and right so again i'm going to make an adapter or i can just do that by hand the other thing i need to do that i have not done yet is we need to get this cross head set where it's level and running parallel to the table in the machine i put it on here but again my pulleys aren't or my gears are not tight right now because i may need to fine-tune things so what i'm going to do right now is we're going to get i think i've got a long parallel that i can put across here and we're going to put a dial indicator and we're just going to sweep this head left and right and if we need to we can adjust the height on either side slightly one way or the other to get it running true then i can tighten these uh these bevel gears down where it should lift and lower the head and keep it parallel to the table so let's do that so here's my setup again i've got a parallel this is a 24 inch parallel that's been ground in where the two sides are parallel i'm just doing that rather than going off the table itself because we do have the t-slots in here and i don't want to have to mess with my indicator as i go across those so this way we got a nice solid surface and we're just going to roll it all the way to the other side and sweep that entire 24 inches so let me step in front of the camera here and it's set on zero right now this indicator reads in thousandths of an inch and you can see it's already dropping and it's dropping pretty fast so we are going to be a good bit out of tram here i kind of figured we were but easy adjustment so we rolled all the way to the other end and we're just a little over forty thousandths out so uh let's see i need to raise this side up forty thousandths of an inch all right so we need to raise this thing up 40 thousandths i don't know if i can turn this by hand i might come up with a way to turn that tell you what i can do i think i can just tighten this set screw up leave the other one loose and turn the shaft and hopefully that'll do it let's try that i'm just going to tighten that one up nice and tight okay i'm going the wrong way there we go all right so we've got it set right on zero hopefully you can see that so hopefully you can see we got the indicator set on zero so now what i can do is tighten up my other bevel gear up top and these should raise and lower at the same rate and keep everything parallel to the table before i lock everything down i want to run this uh all the way back across make sure that that indicator stays on zero and it's looking pretty good so far all right we are about seven thousandths out still so what i'm going to do is i'm going to re-zero my indicator we'll go back to the other side and we'll do this one more time it's just going to take a little trial and error until we get everything adjusted like it should be but we're getting real close here and that's really exactly like it was before let's uh and bring it back across now that is reading so good that i almost don't believe it i might have to just make sure yeah we're still in range yeah that was perfect so yeah we're going to go ahead and tighten up that other set screw i think we got that worked out while we just sit here and get some video of this thing running [Applause] i think it's kind of a neat shot here watching those belt shifts [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] well guys we are to a point now where i think we're ready to make our first cuts with this machine however it's not going to be today and it's not going to be in this video um i'm just running out of time this weekend i'm headed up to the chicago area uh to go to arn fest in fact when you guys see this video i will be in chicago at orangefest and i've got some stuff i got to get packed up and ready to go i am literally just running behind time so we're going to call this video quits today but when i get back from arm fest we're going to find something to clamp down to this table and we're going to make our first cuts and i'm super super excited about it i do need to make my little adapter to go up here i've got a coupler a keyed coupler that i can put on this and just have a little short stub that comes out this end that i'll mill a a square on it that a handle would just fit up on there this handle will just fit up on there i can use the same handle to do all my adjustments with so i need to do that when i get back home that'll be a fairly quick and easy product project just don't have time today to do it so yeah super stoked the planer is working at least it appears to be unless we find a run into a problem when we start actually making cuts with it i don't anticipate anything i think we are i think we're in good shape to take this thing for a test spin coming very soon hang in there guys i know you guys want to see this chip as bad as i do but we're just going to have to wait just a little bit longer but we're almost almost there thanks guys for riding along on this journey on this planer restoration yeah we're really really close and i do still have several other little small things that need to be done to this before i really call it finished uh but we're to the point again where we can at least try it out and make sure everything's gonna work like it needs to and uh yeah we'll do that when we get back from our fest hope to see you some of you guys up at iron fest here uh this coming weekend uh again this when you guys see this art fest will be going on but i hope there's run into a couple of you guys up there really looking forward to getting out of the house it's been a while with all this covered stuff to be able to go on a trip and do some things go to an event so i'm super excited about that and guys with that that's going to be a wrap on this episode as always thank you for watching please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already leave comments down below hit that bell icon again if you haven't already so hopefully you'll get notifications when new videos are posted because our friends at youtube are not always the greatest about letting you guys know when i post videos so that's one way you can make sure that happens and with that we'll catch you on the next video again thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 40,584

Rating: 4.9705181 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Restoration, Vintage Machinery, Metalworking, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, metal planer, metal planer restoration, metal planer machine, restoration videos, vintage machinery restoration, antique metal planer, vintage machinery keith rucker, large metal planer, new haven metal planer, old metal planer, new haven metal planer restoration, flat belt pulley, new haven manufacturing company

Id: XKlKDyyNtBQ

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021