30 Minutes Of Serious Planer / Planermill Action

Unfortunately it's in German, but IMHO a good film

YouTube

Limy Sami said:

Unfortunately it's in German, but IMHO a good film

YouTube

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Ummh.. well. Hired-on narrator voice-over was familiar as well as his use of the language, soo ..I DID find meself sorta spring-loaded in the paranoid war-movie position awaiting:

"Torpedo LOS!"



But dam'.. ever I get my boots on the ground back in Blighty agin'? Pints and pub-grub are on MY dime for finding and posting that one!

Picture the contrast:

The Lee-Norse continuous mining machine as competed with a Joy 1CM worked off great steel chains, alternate links mounting a forged claw with a carbide tip as chewed into the coal-seam, whole "tongue" they curved around like a parallel gang of chain-saws able to be raised and lowered.

WTF has that to do with planers?

Well. on a rebuild contract, some optimistic "genius" NOT who bid these jobs figured we could do weld-build-up and cut back to correct the wear on the INSIDE of worn detachable sorta "Tee slot" shaped chain guides that controlled the path of the chains.

And do so on the cheap vs buying new ones ex-factory. Or even milling new from virgin alloy. Seriously simple task, milling that. Lee-Norse Designers weren't STOOPID.

What's that have to do with a planer?

Well f**k-up number one is that here are a LOT of these modular chain-guide sections on even ONE Lee-Norse continuous miner.

FU number two is that the "weapon of choice" were a lineup of War Two or older Linde curvey-housing 400A DC stick welders. Damned good machines. "Great" even. As such things were... "back in the day" Mig were still called "Heliarc"!

But think about the cost of a team of welders hand-laying corn-cob stick-weld down four outta five fully INSIDE surfaces, each length of "many" chain guides.

Worse, remember that "genius"?

Per bid... with durable hardface, not our usual powdered-Iron rod!

What's that have to do with a planer?

Well, it's only 1964. Our poor-boy company running prewar recycled 3" and 5" bars don't OWN any carbide tooling as can remotely get down inside that Tee slot shape.

We got a bitchin' capable K&T whorey-zontal as can make it work. But off HSS tooling. Which dayshift's best guy has already burnt up making' war on hardface weld bead earlier in the day.

George, A_ "the Eagle", my second shift foreman sez, "anything in your Collitch metallurgy schoolin' as can find a way?"

Sure nuf. Rex 95 blanks can be welded into tee-shapes and still be really strong. So off I go to the ancient planer, 12 up in two rows, trying for 18, but clear out of any form of clamping not already robbed from all over the machine-hall - cobbled "drops" and ignorant bolts included .. by the time I had but two rows secured.

And. .sure enuf' Crucible's all-around-grand-compromise Rex 95 and a planer older than God's eldest Grand Uncle leveled that hardface weld slicker than Owl shit on rainy-day red clay soil!

Welding labour alone had turned it into an economic loss. "Genius" touting hardface advantage to the coal-mine owners never gave a thought to our having to cut dam' near ALL of it right back off to hit OEM size spec, given "wear" was the only pre-prep to make any SPACE for it to live in.

What's that got to do with a planer?

Only task I ever set-up and run one on was that barefoot POOR emergency "save". First go not trapped inside the pages of a dead-tree book.

Lucky that machines in general kinda "converse" with some among us as earlier generations in our own backline could "whisper" with horses, sheep, .. or even shy clams, crabs, and codfish.. to earn a reliable crust! You'd have to know a million years of humans with hunger as a motivator? Seriously alert and clever f**kers when they have no other option.

"Til you posted that link, never even SEEN a planer "moving" with every damned bit of it good as can be and all the factors done RIGHT on clean, new tasking.

Thanks for that! "Feels good" to know that not ALL the wurld had to live off table-scraps of wore-out Iron garbidge put to the task of fixin' OTHER Iron garbidge by ordinary folk with bills to pay..

"Made my day" as it were!

"Pedigree" - or wotever - on my dime, mate... we should live long enuf' to hoist 'em eyeball to eyeball!

Thanks for wasting a large part of my morning... and the video was pretty good too!

jim rozen said:

Thanks for wasting a large part of my morning... and the video was pretty good too!

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"Eye of the beholder" thing..... as always...

jim rozen said:

Thanks for wasting a large part of my morning... and the video was pretty good too!

Click to expand...

Any time Jim

I kept hoping they would show the tool lifting mechanism- looked pretty neat. Sure did like the Stop function- nice and instant!

I think, it's a re-post. I already have it booked marked from a while back. Still a good video.

JS said:

I think, it's a re-post. I already have it booked marked from a while back. Still a good video.

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I wondered the exact same when I thought about posting it JS, but couldn't recall seeing it, ...........and as it could always be deleted, I went ahead.

Greg Menke said:

I kept hoping they would show the tool lifting mechanism- looked pretty neat. Sure did like the Stop function- nice and instant!

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I thought I noticed they'd added some compression springs on one of the clapper boxes to aid the return action. That's an old trick.

Regards Tyrone.

Greg Menke said:

I kept hoping they would show the tool lifting mechanism- looked pretty neat. Sure did like the Stop function- nice and instant!

Click to expand...

That weren't springs!

Positive lift, operator - or set-up "gang lead man" - (German way, Old Skewl) selective fixed amount OF it, pushrod, cams, or maybe hydraulics back of it, rather.

That outfit put in all the bells and whistles on their goods. Why not? More predictable = less distracting operator stress, better work, reduced risk of crashes, lasts a long time.. so is near-as-dammit "free" to build-in, and pays back any cost, first WEEK of use.

OldER Skewl do-everything-manually-by-years-long-painstakingly-trained-up manual skills that a devastated post War Two Germany was alert enough, and DESPERATE enough, to LEARN the value of Automatificating.. off their industrially overwhelming INVADERS and "former" enslaved lands, workers, factories - and even products and blueprints for.

Complex world, yah twig to just how MUCH of Weird-Adolf's war-support technology and even physical hardware had not ever BEEN "German Made" nor even German-designed to begin with. Looter empire is a major part of what he operated.

Clever "consumable machine tools, replace with newer and faster" yanks, Brits, Dutch, Czech, Belgian, and even the sneaky FRENCH, Romanians, and Eyetalians, as had all learnt to out-engineer and out-simplfy the operation of machinery of their onct overly-traditional Germanic cyclical rude-bugger neighbours.

And then ...it paid well. So they picked it up and RAN with it all. Still tryin' at that part, too, Germany is.

When same-lesson, learnt just as well, Japan ain't kicking their CNC ass off a Purchase Order...

... that Gene Haas somehow missed underbidding, with standard 'merican approach. "Hard-hammer the expendable bugger to flinders at full-gallop, scrap it, buy newer, better and faster with the PROFITS made sooner" plan, anyway!

"The more things change...."

The old guys I worked with would fix a piece of flat bar, or even another planing tool, to the clapper box pointing upwards. They'd trap a large compression spring in between the bar and the ram casting. The clapper lifting mechanisms were usually solenoid operated over here and the spring gave gravity a hand in returning the clappers to their cutting position.

If you look at the film at 9 mins 15 seconds in you can see the springs but in this case they appear to be part of the design of the clapper box.

Regards Tyrone.

Another tool lifter trick was to clamp a back flap hinge to the back of the tool, with the lower edge of the bottom (and free) leaf below the cutting edge of the tool so that on the forward / cutting stroke it hinged up and clear, but when it ran over the end of the workpiece the leaf dropped and riding on the workpiece lifted the tool until the start of the next cut.

Ref back flap hinge Eliza Tinsley Back Flap Hinges 63mm 2-Pack

Back in the day it worked well, though best with a nicely worn - aka loose hinge.

Limy Sami said:

Another tool lifter trick was to clamp a back flap hinge to the back of the tool, with the lower edge of the bottom (and free) leaf below the cutting edge of the tool so that on the forward / cutting stroke it hinged up and clear, but when it ran over the end of the workpiece the leaf dropped and riding on the workpiece lifted the tool until the start of the next cut.

Ref back flap hinge Eliza Tinsley Back Flap Hinges 63mm 2-Pack

Back in the day it worked well, though best with a nicely worn - aka loose hinge.

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"Good Old" one. Brass... or even plastic.. hinges .. "or equivalents" .. can work, too.


And that trick has been used on a WHOLE lot more than just planers and shapers, some applications nowhere near a "shop".!

Limy Sami said:

I wondered the exact same when I thought about posting it JS, but couldn't recall seeing it, ...........and as it could always be deleted, I went ahead.

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Glad you did Limy since I must have missed it the first time around. Thanks. By the way, I liked the way it ended, with an abrupt oriental gong.

-Marty-

Sane a a Rockford, hydraulic tool lifters...Phil