Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Feeling Good!

I am feeling really excited about the Glider being close to being put in service. I took it all apart again, and my son and I moved it from my garage into my basement shop where I plan to use it. There I completed all the wiring, and started putting it back together for keeps.

The fact that the sandblasting shop lost a number of pieces quickly became an issue. I had to custom order several items from Fastenal. Several pieces had damaged threads on them, so badly damaged that I had to take them to a machine shop to be rethreaded.  I am also awaiting a portion of the tabletop from a fellow in Massachusetts, the sandblasting shop managed to lose my original, luckily for me this kind fellow is giving me a spare that he has. Anyways, the upshot is that the project is mostly stalled for a week or so until I get these parts all in.

I just hope that the saw lives up to its billing, unlike the Parks Planer which I have never successfully dialed in!

However, I did solve THAT problem by picking up a good condition General 130 14" planer. It's from 1966 I believe, and a more precision tool than the Parks. It has a 3 phase motor on it, so I have a TECO VFD on order and as soon as it gets here I'll put the General into service and then it is goodbye Dewalt plastic piece of sh*t planer and goodbye to Parksie too. And hello to a bit of extra space! I'll miss Parksie though, my son and I put a lot of time and $$$ into it. We did learn a ton from the process though too.

 14" General 130 Planer

 12" Parks Planer (AKA Parksie)


3 comments:

  1. the general is an amazing little beast. I swapped out my three phase motor, but i wasn't aware of the existence of vfds at the time.

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  2. Factorymation has the best prices on them, plus they ship to Canada. Cheaper than a new motor, plus you can run multiple machines off it in a one-person shop!

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  3. i have a teco50 (if memory serves me correct) on my disk sander, great little tools.

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