South Bend Shaper 7"

I have what I think is a 7" SouthBend Shaper that is in my late fathers shop. I am getting ready to sell it but I need to know what I am dealing with and know how to fairly price it. I have been around this machine most of my life so I know that it works and how to use it at a high level but I don't know many of the specifications one would want to know when looking to purchase it. In other words an informed buyer would quickly exhaust my knowledge of it. I am hoping some of you guys can help me understand the relevant specs for it, how to fairly price this thing and where there might be a market for it.

Do you have the vice for it?

You want to sell it as complete as you can. This includes the tool holders (some shaper tool holders ARE specialized to shapers) and a dedicated vise is a near necessity to successful use of a shaper for small pieces. The "Drill press" vise commonly seen are not "beefy" enough for this service.

I haven't been paying that much attention but a good price would be $750. You might get a grand if all complete including do-dads and the tool is "plug & play."

South Bend is a "name." Your market would be mostly "hobbyists" as the work-a-day world will view this as a "toy," and most commercial shops would use a milling machine in preference to this (speed of output primarily.)

Still, anyone looking for South Bend will probably have had his machine teeth cut on a South Bend lathe which DO still hold a position in the work-a-day world - although they're quickly getting upgraded to something more modern. But the reputation is there - and will help you sell this.

The pricing between a South Bend 10 bench and this are similar - and the users are similar. And the demand is similar.

Joe in NH

sfox111 said:

...I am hoping some of you guys can help me understand the relevant specs for it, how to fairly price this thing and where there might be a market for it.

Click to expand...

I agree with post #3 above. You may find that the "market" you are enquiring about exists, in the present era, only in the form of a scattering of small individual shops, rather than a concentration of eager shaper buyers in a particular segment of the manufacturing/machining world. Selling a machine such as yours may depend on catching the eye of a vintage-minded home shop guy, who may or may not read 'The Home Shop Machinist' and hang out on sites like homeshopmachinist.net. For such a buyer, your machine might well be appealing and useful. The story may be slightly different for larger machines which were made for industrial environments. For an example of one end of the pricing range for such a machine, see
American Tool Works Shaper for sale in Torrington, CT

-Marty-

Yours is a later model with automatic oiling. That's a plus.

Start at 750 and reduce it by 100 every time you renew the ad.

Shaper prices are very regional. Places like the rust belt have relatively plentiful machines for hobbyists to cherry pick, whereas other regions are colloquially known as 'machine tool deserts'.

I paid $1200 for my Atlas before freight because it was the only machine available in a several hundred mile radius. (I wanted a bigger work envelope than my small Burke No. 4 mill could provide and didn't have space for a full size mill.) South Bend shapers are generally considered to be a step up from the Atlases.

I didn't check to see if this is the same model number but should be close enough to help answer buyer's questions .
http://www.vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/23274.pdf
Also I didn't check carefully to see if there may be more Shaper information among the other South Bend publications
South Bend Lathe Works - Publication Reprints | VintageMachinery.org
More info available here too.
South Bend Shaper
Jim

Not the worst looking one I have seen.

Being South Bend, is a definite plus.

Any accessories that are around for it, will definitely add to the appeal. At the very least, a vise. No vise and you take a solid kick inna soft spot, as far as the folks that are willing to look at it. Page 3 of this site shows pretty good pictures of the vise and other accessories. South Bend Shaper

South Bend also produced an Indexing head and rotary table that were pretty specific to that model. They are worth darn near what the machine is. If any of the accessories for the shaper are around, they will add materially to both the value, and to the amount of interest that it will draw.