RogerS":6odrn0k6 said:
You are, as usual, talking complete and utter boll ox.
Hi Roger, I agree that Jacob can be quite dogmatic, and sometimes probably gets up peoples' noses with his forthright presentation.
However, on this grinding of spindle moulder cutters in the workshop by the machinist or the craftsman on a bench grinder he is describing what used to be a fairly common practice. Right through the 1970s to the 1990s I worked in workshops that had a drawer or drawers with a wide selection of such cutters, some of which I'd ground myself.
We quite commonly ground just one cutter and then looked in the drawer for another already slightly heavier ground cutter that was then fitted in the block on the opposite side and set back from the profile of the newly ground cutter to act as a 'balance'. We didn't always get it just right, hence the tendency of spindle moulder operators to squat down under the table of the machine and do a quick start/stop test run of maybe 3 or 4 seconds just to listen and test if the machine ran sweetly … or vibrated like a good'un. If the latter, it was time to rethink and find an alternative ‘balancing’ cutter to get it all running smoothly.
I haven't ground any cutters for probably a bit more than eighteen or twenty years. The 30 mm bore blocks below, kept in my toolbox for primarily sentimental reasons, were probably new in the 1960s or 70s, but they haven't been fired up in anger in a long time. On the left is a Wadkin branded ‘Whitehill’ block, and to the right is a slotted collar type with a bearing at the top of the picture: this latter was normally used with straight cutters set to protrude to the same circumference as the bearing for template work, e.g., cabriole legs, etc. I no longer have any desire to grind a cutter(s) and set it (them) up in a block and run mouldings.
Health and safety regulations and practices have changed a lot over even my career. Having said that, things were a lot better in the 70s when I started than they were in earlier decades. I haven't seen a square head block spin since the early 80s, and I think they'd officially been made redundant or superseded about 30 or more years before that - they were truly fearsome bits of kit, in my opinion, and very common (normal?) in the early twentieth century. I did, however, just once see an old wood machinist with several damaged fingers, i.e., bits missing, set up a square head block over a dumpling and a ring fence of some sort to run a profile on a length of what I think was a compound curved stair handrail – I can’t recall for sure what it was now, but it certainly wasn’t simple and straight, hence the dumpling, and the risky moulding operation. I was probably about twenty years old, and it scared the hell out of me then, and thinking about it even now sends a bit of shiver down my spine, ha, ha. Slainte.
Below. Home ground single cutter below a 'Whitehill' block. Slotted collar block to right.
Below. Cutter fitted in 'Whitehill' block, as an example of typical appearance prior to a run, although the balancer is missing here.
