Thread: Douglas Shaper Vice Improvements

I have been using my Douglas shaper more frequently of late mainly due to the neat finish it imparts. Neat finish is one thing, accuracy's another and it was lacking. The shaper would cut a taper on anything held in its vice, about a thou in two inches. So with accuracy being more important than cosmetics I did something about it.

The table top face was not square to the x axis so I recut its surface.

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The vice base when checked with an indicator, had three roughly equally spaced high points. Clamped at those points onto a faceplate, I cleaned up the bottom face of the base with a HSS cutter. Then I used the boring head in its facing mode to clean up the upper surface.

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With the base cleaned up I was able to "survey" the vice which revealed a drop of around 0.0035" in one corner and a slight hollow in the middle of its ways. There was considerable damage to the ways directly in front of the fixed jaw and to remove it I had to cut to a depth of around 0.010". In the process, I neglected to lock the downfeed on the shaper's head and it auto fed itself into the narrow section of the bed casting. I "fixed" the mess up on the mill.

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The lowering of the ways resulted in some variation in the thickness of the way edge or lip. I used an endmill to carefully recut the underside of the lip.

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The reduction in lip thickness also required modification to the sliding jaw. Before I could work on the sliding jaw the fixed jaw had to be cut down to the sliding jaw's height to enable the vice to be clamped upside down on the mill's table.

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With the modifications completed and the vice reassembled there is no discernible needle movement on a 0.01mm indicator when traversed along a 6" parallel resting on the vice ways.

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Worth the effort.

Bob.

Hi Bob,fantastic work and thankyou for taking the time to document it.I probably need to do the same for my shaper but will wait until I've found a more correct vise.
Cheers Nick

Thanks for posting Bob. Something I will do in the new year too.

Simon

Bob

Did you consider fixing the variation in the thickness of the way edge with the shaper? Wondering why you chose the milling machine for this part. No way of getting the clapper box to work properly on a cut on the underside?

Eric

Originally Posted by lamestllama

Bob

Did you consider fixing the variation in the thickness of the way edge with the shaper? Wondering why you chose the milling machine for this part. No way of getting the clapper box to work properly on a cut on the underside?

Eric

Eric,

To be honest I never contemplated using the shaper for dealing with the way edges. The mill seemed like the only option. Douglas appear to have used an endmill in a similar fashion.

My greatest challenge was holding the vice body level and parallel to the x axis. While the photos show a helix clamp restraining the vice's outboard end, the clamp when tightened twisted the vice body out of alignment. The clamp was replaced with a simple vice stop that worked well enough to prevent cutter induced deflection.

The shaper's absence of graduated collars on the table feeds making table movement pretty much guesswork, renders some operations difficult. The decision to use the mill was easy.

Bob.