WTB: Whiton Gear Cutter

Another one of my crazy pie-n-the-sky dreams here:

Our shop apparently had a Whiton Gear Cutting machine in the past. When we bought the Randall Company in 2006, they still had the manual for the machine floating around the shop, some scattered fragments of tooling, and a lot of gears that were made in house in the past with no machine to make them (had several horizontals, but no planetary indexers). I think it went away with a scrap man years ago, but I'd like to find one again if they ever turn up.

For Reference (thanks to the Vintage Machinery site):

I have one I might part with. About 2 years ago a pair showed up in Charlotte NC. About 2 hours away

I have one that I love and plan to keep. If you have the manual and can share a scan someday that would be great.....

DeSelle said:

I have one that I love and plan to keep. If you have the manual and can share a scan someday that would be great.....

Click to expand...

Definitely will! It might need to go via Email though. I'll post a pic of what I have and If anyone wants a PDF of it, PM me an email address.

PM Sent! Thanks!

If you get them scanned, vintage machinery is an excellent repository for these manuals.

My name is Brian and I'm a toolaholic.

Ok, I've got the manual scanned. It's a bigger file (73mb when compressed or so) so I might need to send it via Dropbox or something.

The manual is from 1909, and is for a machine newer than the ones pictured above. It's an "automatic" gear cutter, so it's more complicated but it looks like it's more adaptable than the old hand feed machines.

It's 64 pages of "Descriptive Treatise and Instructions" so there's no parts break-downs, just lots of words, charts, and set-up diagrams. The back also has a lay-out for setting up the overhead line shafting, and math formulas for calculating gears. Our manual had some hand written notes in it including some scraps of paper in the back with gear tooth data and some time logs, which I scanned with the book. There's a couple dates too from the 1950's up to 1963, where the writer noted:

"Laid of Ordinance
Gauge 1-4-63
no work Roy
cleaning up"

Sad but kinda cool that such a snippet in time survived. The Ordinance Gauge Co. of Philadelphia, PA designed and built a line of Wire Stitching machines (industrial stapler using spool of wire instead of clips) right after WW2. At some point (late 60's or 70's?) the line was sold to the Terex Corp, and then around 1985, the line was sold to the Randall Co., who we bought in 2006 and are still building the staplers. Ordinance gauge is hard to track historically, but at the very least I know the gear cutter was making our machines from the late 50's up until it disappeared between 85' and 06'. When we bought Randall, the rumor was that a good chunk of their manual machine shop equipment was purchased along with the tooling, prints, inventory, etc. that came with the Stapler line when purchased from Terex.

The manual's been uploaded to Vintage Machinery.org

D. E. Whiton Machine Co. - Publication Reprints - Whiton Automatic Gear Cutter Manual | VintageMachinery.org

Enjoy!