It is a good thing I have no room for that planer, or I'd be asking where in NY it is located. Streck is still in business- they are an old machine shop located in Watervliet, a few miles north of Albany, NY. If the planer ever was rebuilt by Streck, it either never was rescraped, or has seen so many years' use that the flake scraping usually done to finish off scraped surface is mostly worn off. Interesting note is the use of "diamond plate" (steel deck plating with a raised diamond tread pattern on one side) for the motor mount plate. The old "school room green" or "puke green" was typical shop paint years ago, and the planer is wearing some of it. I can well imagine the planer worked for years with the motor drive on it in some shop in a reasonable radius of Albany, NY. The fact the planer sits on levelling pads (using wedges to adjust for level) tells me it was being used for doing fine work. It is a complete planer, looks to be in good condition, and a size that is moveable without breaking the bank to do so. If I had an outbuilding/shop, I'd be on it. My shop is in the basement of our house, with some machine tools in the garage, and it is at the "totally full" point. Whitcomb built a lot of planers, and finding one that has not been beat on, used as a part time welding table, or been left to be a catch-all for everything in the shop that had no other place is a good thing. As I wrote, that green paint brings up memories of old machine shops, bad lighting, the smell of sulphur/lard cutting oil in the air, and the flap of leather belting as a continuous background sound. Not sure why it was, but it seemed like in the old shops, that color green wound up on everything- walls, wainscoting, window frames, doors, and machine tools.
Streck's went through a few changes of management, and was, for a time, the biggest machine shop in their region. I was in the Streck shop a couple of times about 30 years ago. Their biggest vertical boring mill was a shop made machine tool, and since we had a job needing a vertical boring mill, I was taken to see it. It consisted of the drive and faceplate from some smaller boring mill being mounted in a pit so the faceplate was approximately flush with the floor. The faceplate was centered between two "lattice work" steel columns that were anchored to the concrete floor slab and partially supported the shop building. The "rail" of the boring mill was likely taken off a larger planer and was mounted on the two columns. I forget how the rail was raised and lowered on the columns, but it was apparently a machine tool that worked for Streck's for years. Streck had an excellent reputation years ago and did do machine tool rebuilding aside from being a heavy machine shop. By the late 1980's, when I was in Streck's shop, they were pretty much a ghost town with a handful of men working and most of the shop sitting cold and quiet. The planer in this thread probably came out of Streck's in the '40's or early '50's when the area around Albany and Schenectady was alive with manufacturing industry and machine shops- and also about the last time anyone was likely to buy a belt driven planer for a working shop. Seeing the diamond plate motor mount speaks of a shop owner who was not going to spend the coin for a piece of smooth steel plate, and used what they had on hand.
