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Planer in Vietnam

Joe Michaels

Diamond
Joined
Apr 3, 2004
Location
Shandaken, NY, USA
I found an interesting youtube showing an openside planer in use. The youtube was made in a machine shop in Vietnam, and is entitled:

(in Vietnamese, a language I do not know) "CO KHI CHE TAO"

The planer is an openside planer, hydraulically driven, made by Fuji Seisakusho

The hydraulic cylinder for moving the platen is visible, and it is made in sections with flanged joints. I'd seen this construction years ago on some very long steam cylinders on "shotgun" carriage feeds in a sawmill.

The machinist is running the planer to cut some sort of slots in what looks like a long mill roller (rubber mill ? sugar cane mill ?). The roller is setup with what looks like a milling machine dividing head and footstock. The overall setup with the roller is too long for the platen of the planer, so the dividing head and footstock are extended beyond the ends of the platen on steel plates. Planer stroke is likely maxxed out.

The cutting tool appears to be an old style forged "swan necked" tool. Possibly, there is a cemented carbide tip brazed onto it (as I think I saw on a planer tool laying nearby).

The machinist and the planer are hard at work in the youtube. There are a number other youtubes of Vietnamese machine shops, all with titles in Vietnamese. In one, a machinist is cutting a helical gear on a universal horizontal milling machine with a dividing head geared to the table lead screw. He has a group of young people, all in blue work clothes, and is explaining the job to them. The young people are attentive, and it may well be an apprentice training program of school. That setting is in a working shop, grungy surroundings and hard-used machine tools.

Setting the history and politics of Vietnam aside, the people in the youtubes seem hard working and resourceful, and are doing real machine shop work with older manual machine tools. Seeing a planer in action on a real job was what drew my attention to the youtube. The planer is likely Japanese, and being hydraulic, it may well have been something that came into Vietnam after WWII, maybe for a rubber mill's shop.

I enjoy watching youtubes of people who are "making do" with old machine tools in today's world. I am sure there are shops with CNC machine tools in Vietnam, but the youtubes I have seen are taken in machine shops with manual machine tools. In another one of the Vietnamese youtubes, a machinist is milling a keyway in a large diameter shaft of mill roller. The roller is supported on steady rests and the tailstock center of a large engine lathe. The chuck is turning, but the work is not held in the chuck. Kind of a strange optical illusion, seeing a lathe chuck turning and work standing still. The reason is a machinist has mounted a magnetic based drill on some bracketing off the compound of the lathe so the spindle of the drill lines up with the centerline of the work. He has an end mill cutter in the chuck of the mag base drill, and is using the lathe's carriage feed to move along his "milling head" to cut the slot or keyway. Resourceful, for sure. Not according to the books, but when people do not have what "the books says", resourceful people find ways of getting the jobs done.
 
Looks very similar to the setup which was used on roller mill and "cracker" rolls I used to work on in a previous life. The shop used a shaper. Some of the rolls we used had a spiral pattern, done with a gear driven indexer which was fun to watch.
 
I used to set up a much larger planing machine up for grooving rubber mill "cracker" rolls very similarly to what that guy is doing. These rolls would be chilled iron, about 5 tons in weight, 30"dia, and with the bearing journals and gear seats about 12' to 15' long. Some of the rolls had to have a spiral style groove so the rolls were set up in large roller vee blocks to allow the rolls to rotate slightly as the tool passed down the roll.

There was a fabricated frame type device bolted to the floor at the rear side of the planer that had an adjustable channel you could adjust up and down and for angles. An arm with a large roller ball fixed was fixed to the end of the arm via a complicated system similar to a dividing head. This lot was bolted to the end of the roll.

The ball end of the arm ran in the channel so when you pressed the green button on the pendant the roll moved under the planing tool and turned slightly as it went. A bit rudimentary but it worked a treat. Some rolls had hundreds of small grooves in them so it was a very boring job for the planer operator.

Regards Tyrone.
 
A spiral planning setup similar to that mentioned by Tyrone can be seen here
International Library of Technology: A Series of Textbooks for Persons Engaged in the ... : International Textbook Company : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
If you scroll back and ahead a few pages you can see other examples of less common planer work.
Jim

Hi Jim, yes that's a much simplified version of what we had to flute rubber rolls but basically that's the principle.

Regards Tyrone.
 
Simple but effective. With those extensions on either end of the table for the indexing head and the tailstock they're
making sure they use all of the stroke of the machine too...
 
That open side planer looks like a reversed engineered one of a Rockford planer, made in China. Seen a Chinese copy of a Cincinnati double housing planer on one of my trips to China years back. Don't think they copied our stuff!!! Oh, they have!!!
 
The hydraulic cylinder for moving the platen is visible, and it is made in sections with flanged joints. I'd seen this construction years ago on some very long steam cylinders on "shotgun" carriage feeds in a sawmill.

I wonder if they made the cylinder that way to protect the rod from chips? My planer has a cylinder that is a standard double acting cylinder with an exposed rod. The rod is attached to the table at the Front end and is never exposed to chips as the rod is covered by the table. If you look at the video, linked here , at about 5:30 you can see the center trough where oil is collected and returned to the tank.. If you will notice you just can't see the rod. ( sorry about the camera work... He has been banned from ever touching a camera again!)

It's late and I'm tired, but I don't see where the table is attached to the cylinder in the Vietnam planer.

The cutting tool appears to be an old style forged "swan necked" tool. Possibly, there is a cemented carbide tip brazed onto it (as I think I saw on a planer tool laying nearby).

I sure wish I could get my hands on more of those type of cutters.... I had one, fell victim to my inexperience, that was about 1 inch wide on the cutting edge. Left an almost ground finish on cast iron... Someday when I have time I was going to try to forge a few more.
 
Not to hijack the thread, but I was recently in Vietnam and Cambodia on vacation. Traveling by bus through DaNang I saw the most unbelievable thing - a local pottery shop had someone using a 42" Bullard as a throwing wheel. I was so startled we already long past it before I could snap a photo. Does anyone know if such monsters were used at the USAF/Marine air base located there? I suspect it was repurposed once the base was torn apart.
 
Having just watched the video, there's a funny perspective that comes to me. Yes, that machine is old and obsolete by our standards.

But it would have been an overwhelming wonder at any point in time up to 1800, and barely graspable wonder until say 1900, and a machine of great interest until what, 1950? 1960?

I am perplexed by how the ram works - yes there's a very long cylinder, but the table moves parallel to it, so does force get from the long cylinder to the table - I don't see a ram sticking 20 feet off the end...
 
bryan Machine:

I had the same thoughts as to how that hydraulic planer worked. One thought comes to mind: Possibly, the cylinder barrel is tied to the platen (table) of the planer, and moves with the platen. The piston rod comes out either end of the cylinder and is tied to the planer base at each end. IOW, the cylinder barrel moves on the rod, rod is stationary. Cylinder heads would have a stuffing box or some other form of oil seal to seal the piston rod as the cylinder slid up and back along it.

To really make things slick, think of how pressurized oil is gotten to that cylinder-since it moves with the platen. Long hoses would be the obvious and cheap way out, but with endless stroking of the platen and hot chips, the hoses might be short-lived. My guess is that the piston rod is gun-drilled to allow oil to flow to and from the cylinder. If the rod were made in two sections, each gun drilled, and meeting at a fairly wide piston, the oil flow would be divided into each side of the piston. A wider piston with the piston rods screwed into it and drilled so oil flow to/from each side of the cylinder could happen would work quite well.

By having the cylinder travel ON the rod, with the rod(s) stationary, the hydraulic cylinder to feed/return the platen is contained within the base of the planer. Nothing sticking out, other than piping to and from a hydraulic power unit (term for a packaged unit consisting of a hydraulic pump, motor, reservoir, filters, valves, etc). A hydraulically operated planer or shaper offers an incredibly versatile means of working the platen or ram. With a flow check and metering valve on each line, the speed of the return stroke can be controlled, and cushioning valves can be incorporated in the system to prevent a sudden slam when the stroke ends.

I am familiar with a Rockford "Hy-Draulic" (that is their spelling/trademark) 24" shaper. Amazing machine tool, stepless speed control, no gears and slide block to wear. Hydraulic drive for shapers and planers made a lot of sense. It was not widely used by the old-line US machine tool builders (G.A. Gray, Cincinnati Hypro, for the planers, and probably a dozen or more shaper builders). I suppose on planers, there is a size where it is no longer practical to build a hydraulic drive for the platen.
Rockford built a heavy duty machine tool, and used Vickers hydraulics in it. It relieved them of having to make bull gears and slider mechanisms for their shapers.
Varying stroke is a simple matter of setting stops to "knock off" control valves. No moving a slide block. The ram on the Rockford hydraulic shaper kind of glides in a smooth motion, and at least to me, is perceptibly different than a gear driven shaper like a Hendey or G & E.
 
bryan Machine:

I had the same thoughts as to how that hydraulic planer worked. One thought comes to mind: Possibly, the cylinder barrel is tied to the platen (table) of the planer, and moves with the platen. The piston rod comes out either end of the cylinder and is tied to the planer base at each end. IOW, the cylinder barrel moves on the rod, rod is stationary. Cylinder heads would have a stuffing box or some other form of oil seal to seal the piston rod as the cylinder slid up and back along it.

To really make things slick, think of how pressurized oil is gotten to that cylinder-since it moves with the platen. Long hoses would be the obvious and cheap way out, but with endless stroking of the platen and hot chips, the hoses might be short-lived. My guess is that the piston rod is gun-drilled to allow oil to flow to and from the cylinder. If the rod were made in two sections, each gun drilled, and meeting at a fairly wide piston, the oil flow would be divided into each side of the piston. A wider piston with the piston rods screwed into it and drilled so oil flow to/from each side of the cylinder could happen would work quite well.

By having the cylinder travel ON the rod, with the rod(s) stationary, the hydraulic cylinder to feed/return the platen is contained within the base of the planer. Nothing sticking out, other than piping to and from a hydraulic power unit (term for a packaged unit consisting of a hydraulic pump, motor, reservoir, filters, valves, etc). A hydraulically operated planer or shaper offers an incredibly versatile means of working the platen or ram. With a flow check and metering valve on each line, the speed of the return stroke can be controlled, and cushioning valves can be incorporated in the system to prevent a sudden slam when the stroke ends.

I am familiar with a Rockford "Hy-Draulic" (that is their spelling/trademark) 24" shaper. Amazing machine tool, stepless speed control, no gears and slide block to wear. Hydraulic drive for shapers and planers made a lot of sense. It was not widely used by the old-line US machine tool builders (G.A. Gray, Cincinnati Hypro, for the planers, and probably a dozen or more shaper builders). I suppose on planers, there is a size where it is no longer practical to build a hydraulic drive for the platen.
Rockford built a heavy duty machine tool, and used Vickers hydraulics in it. It relieved them of having to make bull gears and slider mechanisms for their shapers.
Varying stroke is a simple matter of setting stops to "knock off" control valves. No moving a slide block. The ram on the Rockford hydraulic shaper kind of glides in a smooth motion, and at least to me, is perceptibly different than a gear driven shaper like a Hendey or G & E.
 
I was curious so I took a look at the video again and wondered if there might be 2 cylinders running the table on on either side of the trough in the centre of the bed
It looks to me at this point 1:14 of the video YouTube
that there is a cylinder on the right hand side of the bed and a bracket holding what could be a rod end of a cylinder under the left hand end of the table.
When the table reverses It looks to me like the cylinder from the back end is on the machine that would come about in line with the bracket mentioned above.
We can’t see what would possibly be the bracket and rod end on the back of the table that would be tied to the cylinder on the right hand side.
That way it might eliminate the need for a long cylinder hanging out one end so it could fully retract.
Perhaps one cylinder for each direction or perhaps double acting to equalize the offset of one cylinder not under the centre of the table ways.
Each cylinder would only need to travel a little longer than the length of the table.
I don’t know much about planers so I’m just speculating about what I think I am seeing .
Regards,
Jim
 
OK, put the speed on 1/4 and stop it at 0:22.
The multi-section pipe that appears to be multi-section hydraulic cylinder (??) is clearly enclosed to within maybe 18" of the bridge. (Even with the chair just off to the side.)
When the table is full forward (about 0:24) (clapper off the back of the work) the rear of the table is a short distance of crossing over where the front was at about 0:22.
 
It's two cylinders.. One for forward and one for reverse. You can see the attachment point for the rod beside the right hand sylinder at the very beginning of the video.

My planer has an 8' bed and the rod is about 2.750. The table control has no hoses and is hard piped with 1.5" and 2" pipe (As seen in the picture below). There are hoses for each of the clapper boxes but they are small.

20160330_144204_resized_1.jpg

I'm wondering if using two different cylinders would allow them to use smaller rods and a far smaller pumping system?
 
Would having two cylinders simplify the requirement for having a quicker return stroke ?

Over here " Kendall & Gent ", who made some monster Plano-milling machines tried to develop hydraulic tables drives. A pal of mine worked on one of the smaller machines and he wasn't impressed. The feeds rates kept varying over the course of the day due the change in running temperature of the oil etc. Not as much of a problem with a planing machine.

Regards Tyrone.
 
This discussion of hydraulically operated planers has stirred a memory for me. Years ago at the powerplant, we had a mechanic who was a part time logger. He was building a "firewood processor". This machine would receive log-lengths, and automatically buck them to required lengths for cordwood, then split the pieces and convey the cordwood to a truck or pile. This mechanic was a resourceful scrounger, and was using a Detroit 6-71 diesel for the power unit. He got to the design of the splitter, and asked me to help him with it. What he needed was some large force on the "push" or "extend" stroke, and very quick return of the ram in the splitter. I forget how big the bore of that cylinder was, but it was likely on the order of 8". To get the quick return, I designed a cylinder with a ridiculously large diameter piston rod.

Having a lesser volume to fill on the rod side of the piston, the return stroke was very fast. We used a valve which was a combination of check valve and metering valve to control the return rate by throttling the oil being forced out of the "head end" of the cylinder, and added a cushion valve. By tweaking the metering valve, we were able to fine tune the splitter cycling to keep in synch with the bucking saw and loader mechanism. It was all fluid logic, with pilot valves which were tripped by the bucking saw and log loader so each mechanism was triggered by the completion of cycle of the previous mechanism in the "chain". Once up and running, the firewood processor was automatic. Load a full length log on a cradle, hit the start lever and let the processor do its thing. If I remember right, we had maybe 1" of annular space between the large piston rod and the cylinder bore on the splitter cylinder and the return as incredibly quick.

That mechanic joined many of us in the retiree's club from the powerplant. I saw him at a retiree's luncheon, and he told me the processor was going strong and his sone was making a living with it. Hydraulics are quite amazing, and by what amounts to pipefitting, can replace what would require a lot of heavy machined parts to do. The Rockford Hy-Daulic shapers and planers are a good example of this.
 








 
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