Tuckahoe has 2 operational planers, i think 5 or 6' stroke and what seems like a 24" table. There are 2 smaller ones, i think only one those is hooked up to the line shaft. The museum is trying to get a 10' Rockford. Tuckahoe is not a for profit machine shop, so getting stuff done by them can become quite tricky. Paolo can chime in on ways to accomplish things with the museum. There are other big machines there that may be essential in repairing old iron
. I joined because i see value in being part of the museum. We are always looking for members local or remote.
http://www.tuckahoesteam.org/collectionspages/collectionsmachine.html
If you swing around on this image there is Paolo scraping away
Google Maps
here is the 1919 24"x6' rockford.....
http://tuckahoesteam.org/Collections/MachineShop/Rockford_Planer/RockfordPlaner.htm
dee
;-D
Actually, we have only one operational planer, a 6' x 24" Rockford from 1921. However, we are a
working museum, not a job shop.
Here is how we operate: the highest priorities for us are restoring the various machines in the museum, providing support to the other exhibits by making parts to repair steam and gas engines, and doing educational demonstrations (i.e. when we're open to the public, we rather have the machines working on a project, than just cutting chips for the sake of cutting chips).
If we have a few spare cycles, we could use the machines for some other job.
Since I joined a few years ago, we used the planer to re-cut the bed of a 13" South bend belonging to one of our volunteers, we cut some aluminum bar to make blanks for soft jaws, which would get finished on our P&W production milling machine (and given as gift in exchange of a reasonable donation), I've machined to dimensions a piece of 1018 bar for a different project, machined my 18" KingWay dovetail straightedge, and now it is set up for machining a piece of cast iron into a small dovetail straightedge which will be used in the hands-on demos on how to scrape.
We are there almost every Saturday doing some work. Another peculiarity of being a non-for profit organization and not a job shop is that we have to rely mostly on donations (both from us, members, and from the public) and gotta use the tooling that is available, unless you make/donate what is missing.
I'm working on enriching the collection of fixtures that can be used to hold in place work on the planer's platen, but I'm far from being done.
If somebody is willing to wait several months for his project to be worked on and is keen to help the Museum with voluntary work and/or monetarily, we could be considered part of the list.
Speaking about the 10' planer that is being donated to us, we're still working on the logistics of retrieving it and storing on the grounds till it's restoration has passed the "gross phase" and, at our pace, possibly 4-5 years time for restoring it. Its retrieval and transport to Tuckahoe will likely cost us over $2500.
Paolo