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King VTL at auction in Oswego NY

Auctions International has a King VTL at auction in Oswego NY. It belongs to the NYS Canal Corp. I hope someone buys this to use it and not for scrap. Auctions International - Auction: NYS Canal Corp-Phoenix-NY #19650 ITEM: King Vertical Lathe
Dave
No side head, and I've driven one enough to wear me out, king 48"

There are plenty of more modern ones available for just above scrap with pushbuttons for feed levers, digital readouts, etc.

And you don't go home each night so tired.
 
I have no experience with that machine, but I would certainly agree on get the most bang for your buck if you want a biggin like that.

I have a 4" HBM with all the whistles and bells- Power clamping, rapids, push buttons do everything and it's not an easy job to make shop rate with it.
 
No side head, and I've driven one enough to wear me out, king 48"

There are plenty of more modern ones available for just above scrap with pushbuttons for feed levers, digital readouts, etc.

And you don't go home each night so tired.

I think the ram would more than make up for the lack of side head for the vtl work I dabble in.

A lot of the cheap newer bullards have some issues with all the fancy electrical and hydraulic systems. At least the old levers/clutches usually just work. Not sure I'd want to go all the way back to a line shaft machine though.
 
I think the ram would more than make up for the lack of side head for the vtl work I dabble in.

A lot of the cheap newer bullards have some issues with all the fancy electrical and hydraulic systems. At least the old levers/clutches usually just work. Not sure I'd want to go all the way back to a line shaft machine though.
Have you driven a Bullard lately ?

They have the option of two end turrets (as you see on the King) and the side head.

Pinch turning or facing while boring while turning the O.D. etc.

all with pushbutton controls and no weakness anywhere.
 
Have you driven a Bullard lately ?

They have the option of two end turrets (as you see on the King) and the side head.

Pinch turning or facing while boring while turning the O.D. etc.

all with pushbutton controls and no weakness anywhere.

Yep, just none newer than 1970s models. I dont think a machine with all the toys and no weakness as you describe in this post would go for scrap price...The cheap ones are 40yrs old and tend to show their age in ways a fully mechanical machine does not.
 
I'm not used to seeing a belt drive for 1 machine, is this common? The belt drives I've seen (pictures and museums) are for numerous machines.
 
For its age, That old King borer looks to be in excellent condition, Certainly I would guess its age puts it beyond the age of being commercially desirable, But for a preservation set up I think it pushes all the bells, I would say most desirable Maybe someone with a larger re-constructed vintage workshop, Its chuck looks extremely good for its age,
And the nameplate Most attractive , Hope someone bites , Who will look after it for posterity.
 
Probably in a maintenance shop environment and receives only occasional use. Probably a lot of good machine left--hope it cn survive.

Tom B.

"survive" ?

You'll need room, powerline and a crane to service it.
And at that, it has to earn it's keep.
Put an employee on it, and bust y9ur butt all day to hold tolerances and
get parts out the door.

It's a wonder this business can't attract new employees
 
"survive" ?

You'll need room, powerline and a crane to service it.
And at that, it has to earn it's keep.
Put an employee on it, and bust y9ur butt all day to hold tolerances and
get parts out the door.

It's a wonder this business can't attract new employees

Thats a little dramatic. The main motor looks tiny (for a 50" VTL), and a forklift works just fine for repair work and occasional use.

I think everyone understands that this doesnt belong in a production environment.

I own a 42" cutmaster for some unknown reason, and it paid for itself and all the repairs it needed to limp along on one job. It was an unusual job that may never come back around...but I figure for now it's worth keeping around just for advertising.
 
No side head, and I've driven one enough to wear me out, king 48"

There are plenty of more modern ones available for just above scrap with pushbuttons for feed levers, digital readouts, etc.

And you don't go home each night so tired.

It can't be that hard a job looking at the amount of chairs there are around the machine. Do they come with the machine ? Smiley face.

Regards Tyrone.
 
I see what looks like welding fume extractors near this and some of the other machines in the background. Would this be just for smoke from cutting oil or would they be cutting more toxic materials that needed the fumes sucked out of the room?
 
The NY Power Authority, for whom I worked for 32 years, now runs the NY State Canal Corporation. The short version of the story is the governor of NY State decided that to reduce the burden on the taxpayers, the state agencies which were not self-supporting would be attached to the public authorities which are self-supporting. We called it "getting stuck with the dogs".

The Canal Corp was deeded to the NY Power Authority after I retired, and the Power Authority has been trying to "modernize" the Canal Corp. This accounts for the auction. Canal Corp runs canals which have their hub and start just north of Albany, NY (at Waterford, NY), and run to Buffalo, as well as north up to Lake Champlain.

The Canal Corp shops originally had a lot of heavy machine work to maintain parts of the navigational locks as well as their dredges, floating derricks, and tugboats as well as various types of sluice gates and other appurtances on the dams and locks. As time went on, the shops saw less use as the older equipment was phased out or work was outsourced. I recall some years back that Canal Corp was awarding rebuilding of navigational locks to outside contractors. The contractors, in turn, were using local machine shops to make new parts such as cable sheaves and pins for them for some of the old gate hoists. The old lock gates dated to the 1920's and worked by rack and pinion gearing driven by fully enclosed DC motors (which looked like they came out of either a mine locomotive or a streetcar). There were soapstone boards with open "clapper" type contactors, and motor-generator sets to make the DC power for operating the gates. One by one, the old gates have been modernized with hydraulic operators, and provision made to run them in an emergency with a PTO from a tractor. Similarly, a lot of the old floating equipment is gone, and in its place modern equipment such as hydraulic excavator type booms and hydraulic cranes on self-propelled barges (with "Harbormaster" type propulsion using 'modern' diesel engines) is in use. The need to maintain old floating equipment which would require replacing bushings in cable or chain sheaves or re-forging parts for the old dipper dredges and similar is past. While some of the Canal Corp fleet of tugs dates to the turn of the twentieth century, all were dieselized ages ago. Some are on their second generation of diesel power, getting 'Cat diesels in place of the old slow-speed direct-reversing diesels.

If I know my old employer, the Power Authority, they are going thru the Canal Corp like shit thru a goose. Bringing in a consistent system of maintenance resource management software (MRM) and asset management, determining what is needed and what is surplus. Unfortunately, a lot of the corporate thinking in the Power Authority is driven by age of an asset rather than actual condition. A lot of the corporate thinking is also driven by safety concerns. IOW: if a machine tool or piece of heavy equipment is so old it does not have all the latest bells and whistles for safeguards and OSHA mandated requirements, it has to go.

Meanwhile, after 6 1/2 years of "retirement", I was asked if I wanted to come back to work at my old power plant. The role will be as a "mentor", and I was told I would have no specific duties, just be "the old man" to young engineers and apprentice mechanics. Same rate of pay as I retired at, only now there is now deduct for 401K or health insurance benefits and a different tax bracket. When I WAS working full time, we all noticed that corporate, in their finite wisdom, was making no move for "succession planning", and as we retired, no one was being trained to step up to the plate in our steads. Now, a group of us are brought back after retirement.
I asked to work 3 days a week as "retirement" was suiting me just fine otherwise, with plenty of other work going on. I am sure I will get the straight dope as to what is going on at the Canal Corp, as our plant is closest to the Waterford hub. As it were, some of my old buddies at the Power Authority were joking that they ought to have brought me back a few years sooner as I was likely the only one to know what the old equipment at Canal Corp was and how it worked.

My guess as to the fume extractors is they are for welding. Canal maintenance work required a lot of welding, particularly "pad welding" to build up worn teeth, worn cutting edges, worn seating surfaces on some of the flow-control gates. This was "winter work" when the canals were closed to navigation. When the canals are close to navigation, the "pans are pulled"- these are fabricated steel "pans" which form the crest of each dam at most of the locks. The pans are hinged and are raised with chains and locked off. The chains are hoisted by a travelling windlass which runs on rails above the pans on the dam crests. The travelling windlasses run on electricity, and are from the 'teens and 'twenties, unless replaced with something newer. Plenty of winter work once the pans are pulled, and it finds its way into the Canal Corp shops. Not so much machine work, and even less wood work (Canal Corp had quite the woodworking shops with large bandsaws for cutting timbering, planers, and similar).

As an example of how the Power Authority thinks: In 1991, I bought a brand new Powermatic 10" table saw for the powerplant. I ordered it with the Biesemyer fence. It was used for various interior carpentry work as well as for making wooden signs and handrails, packing crates for stuff sent out for repair, and whatnot. Not a great deal of use. Someone in corporate discovered a new table saw with an automatic safety brake triggered by moisture/blood. The saw has some sensor which can detect excess moisture or fluid on the blade and stops the saw by releasing a spring loaded aluminum brakeshoe into the blade while conking out the motor. The saw is made in Taiwan and nowhere near the saw the Powermatic was. We got orders to surplus the Powermatic saw, and off it went to be auctioned. The fact we only occasionally used ANY table saw and the fact the Powermatic was bought new with proper guarding was not even addressed. The word was "it's unsafe and has to go..." I had a hell of a fight to keep our engine lathes and other machine tools as this same line of thinking prevailed. Corporate has lost the capability of realizing that if a person is running a piece of machinery or equipment, they have to take some responsibility for their own safety and the safety of others around them. They want everything to made absolutely safe, automatically so. We had to put "emergency stop" provisions on our machine tools. With VFD drive upgrades, this was not hard to do on some of them, but on others, it still means the machinery has time to coast down and continue doing whatever it was doing to the person who tripped the E-stop.

I am sure Canal Corp, now under the Power Authority's management, is going to be having quite a few auctions of machinery and equipment. There was a nice old "Brown Hoist" railroad steam crane in the Utica, NY yard. A little bitty railroad steam crane as these things go, which was last in steam in January of 1986 (I got to ride it then). It was shoved off the end of the yard tracks into the weeds in the Utica yard and left to set there, overgrown. I think the reasons it was retired then was the operator retired, and the boiler had been derated so many times that the little crane could scarecely get out of its own way. It ran in a cloud of steam from leaking rod packing, and when they tried running it on compressed air, it was so loose that it could not run at all. Since the boiler had asbestos on it, they shoved if off the rails and forgot about it. Along came the Power Authority, and they said the crane had to go. I tried to get it donated to a local railroad historical group, and I hope it happened.
 
It can't be that hard a job looking at the amount of chairs there are around the machine. Do they come with the machine ? Smiley face.

Regards Tyrone.

I dunno, I was a running a 48" one, table ran 90 rpm max.,simple roughing job, and I had a helper.
3 wheel barrow loads of chips a day, but it warnt easy.

No sitting down on that job.

Got another job driving the aforementioned bullard dyn-a-trol.
All pushbutton, and look at the dials (could see them 6' away, early version
of a digital readout).

Holding +.000 -.002 was not a problem.
54" bullard had table speed up to 250 rpm.
 
I am sure Canal Corp, now under the Power Authority's management, is going to be having quite a few auctions of machinery and equipment.

Joe -

I have gotten a lot of my shop equipment (actually the vast majority) off the Auctions International site over the years and still look at it pretty regularly. They started running the Canal equipment about a year ago - there have been several large machines as well as many old trucks, buckets, etc. Even a tug and barges if I remember correctly. Only a couple wood working machines. But most quite old. So far nothing that tempted me to bid - but then I have no space for any more 'treasures' anyway.

The large school systems in NY started clearing shops out maybe 10 years ago. I hesitated when I first saw the auctions but eventually got some fine machines. And some sad stories. When I was picking up two Cincinnati machines in Buffalo was told by one of the guys - when I asked about the tooling - cabinets full went into a scrap metal dumpster. The school employees given the task were told it was a firing offense to take anything. The idiots in charge probably could have gotten more for the tooling than the machines. But that is typical NY State with the morons in charge. One of these days they will run out of items to sell.

Good luck going back into the fray, Joe. I'm not sure I could take going back - think upper management would see the error in their thinking rather quickly and ask me to leave again! The newer VPs probably would not put up with my 'attitude'.

Dale
 
Hello Dale:

I will see what I can find out about the Canal Corp machine tools and auction sales. As for going back into the fray, there is a world of difference between the working environment at the running powerplants vs corporate. There is (or was) a kind of "us vs them" thinking at times. At the running plants, there is enough geographical distance from corporate, and an even wide gulf culturally. I'll see how much corporate has invaded the upstate power plants as far as making life too complicated with corporate procedures for every last thing, and similar maneuvers. The great part of "being retired" is that it is a "job" I can always go back to and never get fired from.

I am going back out of allegiance to the powerplant I retired from, and to help young engineers and mechanics along, teaching them what I can. It's a nice place to be in, and it's kind of like an old first sergeant, chief petty officer, or merchant marine chief engineer coming back to their old outfit or ship. If corporate proves to be too meddlesome, I can always go out the gate into the sunset (again).
 








 
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