Answers to some questions

Winelover

North Central Arkansas
Thanks, Keith. The ones I see advertised say hard plastic, sounds pretty uninviting. The idea
seems really good to have a laser on a snubbie, esp at night.

Bill

I have CT grips on all my snubbies. Especially, beneficial on the S&W J-frames, with their miniscule sights. CT offers more than one design for the J-frames.

http://products.crimsontrace.com/search?w=J-frame

I use and recommend the LG-405 Compact grip. They are combination of hard and soft material. The other models are hand filling but not useful on a CC piece, IMO. Back strap area is soft rubber, as well as the front of the grip. Sides are hard polymer. I also have a earlier, discontinued model, boot grip shape and entirely made of a hard polymer. Activation button is a nylon like pin and not as comfortable as the newer models.
 

Hawk

North Central Texas
I also have CT on all my "indoor" use guns, mostly for my wife's benefit. At indoor ranges, my point and shoot skills are acceptable.
I tell her the bullet goes where the red dot is.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Ok, I was wondering if the 'locker' was like locked diff...couldn't figure the connection to the shaft.
 

Bret4207

At the casting bench in the sky. RIP Bret.
Yes, CS. 4140 to be exact. Our bill was $4,500. I'm pretty sure the splines were hobbed in two separate operations with a good bead-blasting of the first set (left in the pic) before hobbing the smaller set and then off to the lathe again for some final polishing of bearing and seal surfaces.


Not fer nuthin', but a man with a shaper wouldn't have had any trouble handling those splines, internal or external. But, no one uses shapers anymore. I imagine it would have cut the cost significantly.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Yes, shapers do very well for linear features like splines. I imagine that the limitations
on what it can do are why they aren't used much any more. I expect Keith and
smokeywolf can tell us why for sure.

Bill
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Well, a good man with a shaper (and an indexing head and several properly ground cutters) could cut those splines. You could also do it on a knee mill with an indexing head and a special end mill. But a gear cutting machine with the proper hob could cut it far quicker and more accurately. And a guy with a four axis CNC mill (the fourth axis is a rotary axis in the vertical or horizontal plane) and a custom end mill could do it about as fast and accurately as a dedicated gear cutter.

I have a shaper, I used to run very large planers (similar to a metal shaper). Haven't found anything yet I couldn't do with rotary tooling and a good mill. Planers were developed at a time when rotary tooling such as end mills were in their early stages of development. A shaper/planer lets you make complex cuts with simple tooling. With good rotary tooling available for mills the utility value of shapers is reduced.

There is a lot of love in my heart for planers and shapers, they are what I started my machining experience with. But the cold $ & cents part of me says that I would be better off using another tool.

Edit to add: I'm not sure anybody even makes new shapers or planers anymore.
 
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Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Thanks for that clear explanation, Keith. The Prof did well, good stuff.
"With good rotary tooling available for mills the utility value of shapers is reduced.
Not planer specific, but as to 'good rotary tooling', and CNC - the first time a friend
showed me that he could mill an inside thread with his CNC, with the correct special
cutter. Just wow!:oops:

Bill
 
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Bret4207

At the casting bench in the sky. RIP Bret.
Keith hit it on the head- the availability of relatively cheap hardware for mills, along with CNC type controls pretty much killed off the shapers. I imagine there are still a few gigantic planers around, probably overseas. I can recall when carbide tooling was just starting in the late 60's/early 70's. My dad was given one 1/2" shank carbide roughing tool in some sort of trade in the gunshop. He actually carried it around for a few days and showed people his prize! It was that rare to see anything carbide. Times have changed. OTOH, shapers are alive and well in home shop/model shop end of things. A 7" Atlas is about the size of a medium suitcase or window AC unit and can be found for under $1k, often under half that and can do real work. A mill out of the toy category is larger than a large shower enclosure or double fridge and anything decent is going over $2500. I think shapers will be around in home shops, and larger ones in some pro shops for a while.
 

L Ross

Well-Known Member
As I sit here and read all of these posts by machinists, I realize just how little I know. I know my career wasn't wasted, but it sure seems like I took the easy way out to make a living. I'm not complaining, by being frugal, having my pension, judicious use of deferred compensation, investing, a little inheritance, not having kids, we are living the good life in retirement. However, the type of skills I developed in my working career do not translate into a useful ability to repair equipment, smith on guns, or much else for that matter. Mostly what I learned was to be disappointed in my fellow human beings and still wanting to correct their behavior.
 
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fiver

Well-Known Member
the way I look at it.
someone has to be breaking those parts for the machinists/mechanic type guys to build new parts and install them.
they in turn have to go to the dentist or the butcher to get other services, they both rely on the truck driver or rail yard to get their products, and those two need the machinist/mechanics to make or fix the equipment to deliver on their end of the deal.
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
I have a South Bend 6" shaper that I bought specifically for cutting vent lines on the faces of mold blocks. (At one time I had the silly idea of making bullet molds...) I've used it for several other small jobs. Even retrofitted it with a 1/10" graduated scale to keep track of the table location. Maybe if I had a larger shaper or only had a table top drill/mill instead of a full size knee mill I might use a shaper more. I know fully what a shaper or planer will do. As Bret pointed out they are as practical and useful in the hobby machine shop now as they always have been. But they are just not real practical in a profit driven commercial shop anymore. If a shop still has one in working shape they will probably use it for something, it's paid for, right? But nobody that runs a commercial shop has "buy a shaper" on their to-do list. If real estate (shop space) becomes an issue a shaper is the first machine to go out the door to the scrap yard.
 

Ian

Notorious member
Mostly what I learned was to be disappointed in my fellow human beings and still wanting to correct their behavior.

My life in a nutshell. Pursuit of happiness has started to revolve around finding a way to either unlearn what I know about people, ignore it, accept it, not dwell on it, or something other than be miserable about it. One thing I know, there's nothing any of us can do do correct it, not even on a one-on-one basis.
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
One of the first machines I operated as an apprentice was the 20" G&E shaper we had in the MGM Machine Shop. The number of 1-2-3 blocks and blanks I produced for the knee and universal mills certainly stretches well into the hundreds.

During the last 7 years that I ran that shop It was not that unusual for me to be alone in the shop and have the Wilton horizontal band saw cutting stock, while the shaper squared up cut pieces and I would be standing in front of a Bridgeport knee mill or a Van Norman universal mill milling the geometric features.