1940's? Smithway xl mouldmatcher (4 head moulder)

[jar944]

I picked this smithway 3000 series xl moulder yesterday. After I got it home I realized It's a bit of a oddity. They were 2x4 or 2x6 machines and this one is a 2x6 except the spindles are only 4.5".

 

[jar944]

Unloading it was interesting

 

[Oregon rock crusher]

What a beast of a machine! Looks like it would be great if you had hundreds or thousands of feet of Moulding to make or a small sawmill to feed it. Put a shaper to shame in a throughput and chip accumulation. I wonder if they ran 6" cutterheads on the 4" exposed spindle shafts leaving the outer edges extending past? I would expect tooling up for complex moldings would be a fair expenditure.

 

[jar944]

What a beast of a machine! Looks like it would be great if you had hundreds or thousands of feet of Moulding to make or a small sawmill to feed it. Put a shaper to shame in a throughput and chip accumulation. I wonder if they ran 6" cutterheads on the 4" exposed spindle shafts leaving the outer edges extending past? I would expect tooling up for complex moldings would be a fair expenditure.

Hopefully it's a good bit faster than the shapers or williams and hussey I've been using. For any long runs I'm planning on hooking up two blowers and just blowing the chips into a pile outside.

looks like it was crashed at some point, tipped over for sure, but likely threw a knife and bent the spindle or spindles. I can't see any other reason for cutting the heads and the spindles to 4.5". The way the heads are secured you can only run a smaller (or same length) head as the spindle length.

Tooling isn't horrible (beyond the head costs). S4s heads are the cheapest.