September was a complete ‘unmitigated disaster,’ as Bayley would say. The highlights of September disaster included briefly losing all of my soldering irons and moving into an apartment which hadn’t been cleaned in 10 years. At least its over now, and now we plow into October. Lots has happened.

First up, lets backtrack a bit to the events of late August, when I heard about an estate sale from a friend of mine, Nick B. Estate sales are interesting- it is sad that you’re buying the livelihood of the dead, but at the same time, we all will end up that way eventually- the best you can hope for is that your stuff ends up in a good home. Anyways, on August 25, 2020, we ventured to Saugus, MA, to see what we could find. We’d previously been to this estate several weeks prior to help Nick get a lathe, but found little else of value besides the lathe. This time however, we ventured to the garage. And, find we did:

Is that.. a hardinge?

it is indeed a Hardinge….. a Hardinge TR59 plain bed lathe.

I originally thought that this cabinet was likely constructed by the previous owner of the lathe. However, I did a fair amount of internet searching and found a thread which says that this is original and just very rare. I find this wood cabinet quite nice- this lathe on the stock Hardinge metal cabinet looks a little ridiculous (68 inch cabinet for a 40 inch lathe…). The cabinet is a bit deep for my liking, at a full 32 inches despite the lathe only being about 12 inces wide. I guess motors were big back then. It seems that this lathe inherits many of its features from the Cataract brand lathe, a company acquired by Hardinge.

And, the lathe was just the tip of the iceberg.

Next up, we found an exceptionally cute shaper. I’d never actually seen a shaper in real life:

This particular machine is the Atlas 7B shaper, weighing in at a cute 300ish lbs. I had to do a bit of googling to find what shapers are good for, but the quote that stuck with me was, “You can make anything on a shaper, except money!” A shaper is, in essence, a lathe of infinite radius. A single point cutting tool is dragged across the workpiece to create the desired shape. The tool is driven by a reciprocating ram at the top of the machine. The reciprocating motion of the ram naturally means that the material removal rate is quite low, which is why these machines have been almost completely displaced from modern machine shops. However, the use of a single point cutter means that very strange shapes can be cut without any specialized tools: dovetails, splines, and even square holes can be cut without too much effort. Pretty cool!! Definitely a cool tool to have around the shop for doing strange things.

I did a fair amount of googling on these machines, and came up with some fun stuff, including a story about a shaper that shaped its way through a wall, and how to cut round things on your shaper (Al and Aaron told me it couldn’t be done! Ha! Anything can be done with a shaper.. and enough time!!). This article is pretty insane- it even shows how to cut “inverse keyways” where the key and the shaft are actually the same piece of metal. The natural extension to this is obviously cutting gears on a shaper which can be done as well. Definitely a tool which won’t get used often, but is at least funny to have around.

Next up, a little craftsman horizontal bandsaw. Nothing really to see here, except that its cute. I believe this saw has only about a 6″ throat. Perfect for what I want to do. It is actually a little strange: all of the tools at the estate sale were about 2/3 size or benchtop. I guess that was all he had space for. Personally, I do 99% small stuff, so this is great for me. Sadly I forgot to take a photo of it.

Another cute tool emerges from the rubble: an Atlas MFB horizontal milling machine! This machine is also a cute benchtop model. Unfortunately, the table was a little rusty, but the machine was otherwise in good shape.

Two other machines poked out of the rubble as well. One was an Index Model 40 vertical milling machine, which I had never seen before. This machine also fell into the category of “2/3 Size Machine”, just looking strangely small for a vertical milling machine. Accoring to the internet, this machine weighs in at only about 1200 lbs, compared to a Bridgeport’s 2200 ish. You can see the index in the photo below, peeking out.

Second to last, another machine. This is the venerable Linley Jig Borer. A jig borer is in essence a milling machine, but just about an order of magnitude more accurate. This machine has an X travel about a quarter of the Index, yet weighs almost as much. Back in the day, jig borers were used to do exactly that- bore holes in jigs which would then be used in production. Accuracy was of utmost importance, as any errors in the jigs would be copied into thousands of parts. This machine I originally wasn’t too interested in, as it doesn’t add many features to my shop because I already have a mill. However, Aaron and Al were extremely excited about the find, and I eventually came around. It is likely that in the future I will do some amount of high precision work, so I’m sure it will come in handy. This machine is pretty cool, having massive handwheels sporting huge verniers, allowing tenths to be fairly easily read out- pretty cool. Definitely with a tenths DRO, this would be a truly amazing machine. In terms of resources, here is the lathes.co.uk page, and here is an excellent post on why jig borers were used back in the day.

I also decided that I wanted the nice cabinet seen in the right of this photo. It is a nice 20″ wide by 30″ deep ball bearing slide set of drawers.

The final tool, mostly buried- a little surface grinder. Along with the shaper, this machine definitely falls under the category of, “useless, unless you need it, then its great.” The build volume on this guy is a little small, with an X travel of only about a foot. But, good enough. And my work has a bigger surface grinder if I need it. This machine has no autofeed on it, so I may need to build up some brushless autofeed- we’ll see what happens.

Anyways, with all that said and done, I thought about which machines I wanted to take. Eventually, Aaron, Nick, and I decided to offer 2500 for everything, plus our cleaning services to get the garage into a walkable state. I put $500 down, and began moving plans. Quite exciting- plans for Austinshop were officially on.

Read on for Part 2: The garage prep!!!