I love my vintage Davis and Wells horizontal mortiser. I picked it up in eastern Washington state in 2006. I have fond memories of getting a huge hassle from the American customs agents when I crossed the border into the USA on my way to pick it up. It was because I had dreadlocks at the time, not because I was traveling to pick up a Davis and Wells!
The D&W has served me well, if somewhat infrequently, but as time goes by I enjoy the freehand aspect of it less. So I decided to upgrade it with an X-Y table. Thanks to some excellent advice from my friend Craig who has the exact same setup, I was able to source and install a very nice Felder table. I felt somewhat bad destroying the originality of the D&W, but it is a much better tool now and the made-in-Austria Felder is a worthy upgrade.
On a bit of a whim several (10?) years ago I purchased a vintage metal lathe. A 9" Standard Modern, made in Canada back in the day. However I never really got into it, so it sat in my garage until a I got tired of it taking up space and I sold it on.
Recently the bug bit again, and I bought a Vintage Myford ML7 lathe, made in 1951 in England. It has been fun to learn about this entirely new domain of metalworking along with my son, and to turn a few parts.
The other BIG NEWS / disaster was that I damaged a chip breaker on my 8" General jointer early in 2023. The cost of getting a new chipbreaker made at a local machine shop was about comparable to getting a Shelix helical cutterhead. So, six months of dilly dallying and waiting later, I have a Shelix in my jointer. Works very well. Better than the original cutterhead? Probably not.
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