That's a bit of clickbait eh? (What is that!)
I lobbed at my mate's factory one morning (Trim Aircraft in Melton) and out the back was this strange 'Thing'. I didn't know really what it was, but as soon as Tony pointed out that the moving bed could, as well as traversing up and down, also be pivoted around it's centre. A dim little light went on in the feeble little brain. Oooh I can use that! Tony had no use for it, him having a couple of rather tasty Fanuc CNC machines plus all sorts of other very tasty heavy metal, the 'Thing' was destined for land-fill. "it's a Taper-Grinder, and it's yours" he said. But now I had to get it home to my workshop. Hmmm. 'kin' heavy thing. Long climb, dirt track, difficult access etc.
My dear ol' (now departed) mate, the very distinguished sculptor (and dead good drummer), Peter Blizzard who used to create beautiful but big heavy works made from big heavy iron and rock came to my rescue. He lobbed with his tandem trailer with lifting boom, his fit kid, and so with plenty of sweat and oathing we got it up and in.



The 'Thing's' new life was as a guitar neck shaper. Guitar necks need to be accurately carved, they have a gentle taper, and need a perfect profile. I used to do it by hand, but to produce perfectly shaped, repeatable guitar necks, 10 per day instead of 1 per day was an attractive proposition.
You can see a neck mounted in the machine, I replaced the chuck with an adaptor to hold the neck 'heel' and adapted a nice little old jeweller's adjustable hight pulley bench head to hold the 'nut' end.
The cross-slide which used to carry a great big grinder was fitted with my router, (that's it behind that white rectangle).

So by setting the bed angle for the desired taper, we can just run the bed up and down as we bring in the router on the cross-slide to machine, we rotate the neck simply by hand using the big vee-belt pulley.

All fun eh?


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