On your left, laddies and gen'u'mum: Roxie's base (we all knew she was base from the first time we met her) and Roxie's top. You can see how the holes match. Small shaft keeps all in line and larger column is the up-and-down guy. They will mate in the fall in the wild.
A new bearing will get popped into the smaller, rear orfice. Goes in real easy - tap, tap, tap!
Above left the we see Roxie's succulent bottom. One new bearing is visible, in place, having been put in from the top, and the second bearing is in place, having been tapped in from below. These bearings are where the spindle will spin. The shaft is 1/2" and revolves at around 8,000 rpm.
Pic on the right shows the setup for the column on the underside of the table. The round insert will simply drop into the column - note that the small holes on the column will match with those on the round piece. The threaded shaft will screw into the round piece once it is in place; this is part of what raises and lowers the table - the spindle is fixed. .
Left is the round piece inside the column with the pins that hold it in place yet to be tapped home. A note here: to get this out, and there is probably no reason to take it out, I tapped the two pins inward until I could lift the round piece out. I then tapped them back out from the inside with a drift punch, being very careful not to mar the threads; it ain't a great angle to work from. Once I got them out enough I pulled them with Visegrips.
So, here is the round piece set in the column with the holding pins tapped home. It flops around a bit if you push and pull, but it is in there solidly and will do its raising and lowering job fine.
Above left you see the vertical gear shaft threaded into the 'round piece'. It has to interact with something to get the table up and down, and that something is the gear to the left. It is on a horizontal shaft that will feed in from the front of the machine. At the moment I forget if the thicker or the thinner part of the 'other round piece' goes into the body. It will be apparent to you when you mess with it as it ends up flush in front below the tag.
Above and right all is revealed. Both shafts are in place and the gears mate. Note the hex head set screw which will fix the horizontal gear shaft in place; I found that leaving the gears a tad looser than you would like makes them work better. I tightened them up snug originally and they kept binding on me. A collar goes to the outside on the horizontal shaft.
Here is Roxie almost all together. The hold-downs are just plain missing. One would go on that otherwise inexplicable shaft sticking up on the left, and the other would come off a similar shaft which would be inserted in either of the other two holes in the table top; one hold down presses the work to the fence and the other to the table top. They are essentially flat spring pieces. The crank below the round tag raises and lowers the table: about a 2" run. The knob above the round tag locks the column at the set height.
I paid about $300 for Roxie, with 22 cutters in boxes. Probably too much. She is not a shaper in the sense that Oliver and Powermatic make shapers. She is either a sort of toy, or a glorified router. Either way I think I am going to have fun finding out what she will do.
So, here's her bonafides. Who among you can gainsay the name of ATLAS? Somebody in the p.r. department went wild with this one - Power King. Can I buy an adjective?
Ok, ok, this isn't her color, not really. But to get the glare off the tag so you could actually see it I got into one of my dark moods.
I know this is ca. '50, or think I know, and am wondering if the 8048 serial number might be August of '48?
Ebert says "she's as shapely as they come"
Click here to add your text.
Figuring there was obviously some mistake when I received Roxy and found that with the motor set on its base its shaft was horizontal but that the shaper's shaft was vertical, necessitating a 90 degree twist in the belt, so I decided to mount the motor in a vertical axis.
So, I made the cutout on the band saw, then glued up the pieces for the top, drilled a scrap of stainless and mounted the motor to it, and set all this atop the steel stand she originally came on, redone in Johnny's base colors.
You might notice I did not make any tension adjustment. I hope a link belt will preclude my having to move motor or Roxy to adjust.
Here's the result, which I am not half proud of. However, on the day I finished it all up - still no new sheave and belt, I received the booklet on the Atlas Model 411 Shaper that Jolene Olds of Atlas had kindly sent to me, and damned if the machine didn't originally come with that twist in the belt.
Pragmatically it is pretty neat. You don't need a reversing switch when slipping the belt off a sheave and turning it 180 does the same thing!
Just look under Atlas and Catalogs. I am sorry the copy is so bad. I scanned it to keep the size down and the clarity suffered. Between the paper and my photos Roxy's anatomy is Playboy-clear. Anyone wanting their own hard copy can get it by going to the Atlas Homepage and emailing to Jolene Olds, Service Cutomer Center. She probably has similar papers on drill presses, etc.
Most likely the last shot of Roxy for her album. This is the idler assembly I built from 5/8" bolts and a couple of old bearings. It serves well to compress the belt so that it clears what looks a lot like Roxy's miniscully feminine anal orfice. The belt runs on the new Browning sheave like a dream. The tension is fairly loose. One man's opinion here, but I think link belts run tighter than regular V belts when under power due to their tendency to bow out and try to form a circle, thus actually shortening their length; I believe by their very linking nature they are prone to this. No slippage on the first few cuts. The pulley ratio is 5:2, for a spindle speed of 250% of the motor's 3450 rpm, or about 8625 rpm.
