Atlas 7B or similar?

[NCjeeper]

It's all luck and timing.

Yep. I sold my Atlas for $1000. Had the vise, guards, and handles. Even sitting on the factory stand. Finally, a fellow from Ohio drove down and bought it.

 

[Aaron_W]

I think your estimate is wildly low. If I had one to sell though, I'd agree with you. Lol
I sold my Ammco 7" shaper for $650.00. Actually less, but the details are fuzzy. There was only one person who even made an offer. It's all luck and timing.

Agree, the Atlas shaper's were also sold through Sears as a Craftsman in the 1950s. No idea how many they sold, but for it to be worth Sears having them in the catalog that could not have been a small number. They were not cheap either, $410 in 1953 or about $4300 in 2022 money. A 12" Craftsman lathe with a quick change gear box was only $310 the same year.

The 1940s and 1950s seems to have been the boom time for small shapers Ammco / Rockwell, Atlas / Craftsman, Logan, South Bend and many others offering a 6-8" shaper during that time.

Funny thing to me is it seems like nobody knows what they were used for. Many say they are too small for industrial use but if the others were priced like Craftsman that seems like way too much money just for the hobbyist market.

 

[MERLIncMan]

Agree, the Atlas shaper's were also sold through Sears as a Craftsman in the 1950s. No idea how many they sold, but for it to be worth Sears having them in the catalog that could not have been a small number. They were not cheap either, $410 in 1953 or about $4300 in 2022 money. A 12" Craftsman lathe with a quick change gear box was only $310 the same year.

The 1940s and 1950s seems to have been the boom time for small shapers Ammco / Rockwell, Atlas / Craftsman, Logan, South Bend and many others offering a 6-8" shaper during that time.

Funny thing to me is it seems like nobody knows what they were used for. Many say they are too small for industrial use but if the others were priced like Craftsman that seems like way too much money just for the hobbyist market.

I think the 40's and 50's were probably the boom time for.... most everything American.
After that it was VietNixoNaftaBushvGore and Twitter. The fall of the Stazi was pretty cool though.



As for how many they made, where they are, what kind of shape their in...

Hey! What's the shape of the shaper, does it still shape?

Sears Sold Shaping Shapers in Super Shaping Shape!

I had thought it would have been fun to get the Shaper, the Horizontal Mill, and the Lathe to have a matching set of Norman Rockwell's Americana Hobby Machinist. I, however am not independently wealthy.

Maybe there are lots still around in dad's barn or under Grandad's Quonset Hut, but the market is beginning to resemble that of old American Anvils - extremely sparse and rapidly irrationally priced. Post-leg vises are like that too - so I bought a Chinese, hardened cast-steel anvil (bounce is fine on it) and made a post-leg.

I'm not up to the challenge of making a shaper though - maybe someday, probably not. Not with good steel over $1.00 a pound here.

 

[jwmay]

I wanted to do that too. I'm sure people have. I saw a Atlas/craftsman woodworking shop that a guy put together. Basically a big bench with a line shaft that drove all his benchtop AC woodworking equipment. It was neat.

 

[Aaron_W]

I wanted to do that too. I'm sure people have. I saw a Atlas/craftsman woodworking shop that a guy put together. Basically a big bench with a line shaft that drove all his benchtop AC woodworking equipment. It was neat.

Motors are not cheap, even more so in the past and it was common for machines to be sold without a motor. The cost of the motor might be 10-25% the price of the machine.
You can occasionally find catalogs offering home shop line shaft arrangements so you could run your shop off of one motor. If you ran 4 or 5 machines the savings might add up to the cost of a whole extra machine, so I can see why it would appeal to people.

Delta offered a workshop package in 1930 that could be run off of a 1hp gasoline engine or an electric motor. Not the most practical but it would be fun to set something up like this.

 

[wa5cab]

For many years, I have maintained a database of Atlas built metal working machines, mostly lathes, garnered from the Yahoo Atlas-Craftsman list, which moved to groups.io in early 2018, and from the Atlas-Craftsman forum on Hobby-Machinist. Lists include serial number in moist cases. The shaper section is much smaller than the lathe section. However, the highest Atlas 7B Shaper serial number is 13838, from which I have assumed a total build of about 15000. However, in the same time frame I have only had a grand total of 3 Craftsman 101. 16000 Craftsman shapers reported. The highest serial number is 409. Atlas built Shapers for about 22 years whereas Sears only sold them for the last 10 or 12. But that doesn't quite jive with a build of only a little over 400. Atlas built and sold and Sears sold the horizontal mills over about the same time span and the relative numbers are similar. Maybe Sears did a better job with the lathes than with the shapers and mills.

 

[jwmay]

Well I read that a couple times. I don't know if it means there's not many, or that there's not much evidence of many, or. Anyhow I would have liked to own one at one point.
That Delta kit looks a lot like the Atlas set up I saw. But the jackshaft was on the table top. Looking at it, I almost wonder if it was a Delta kit I saw, and I'm just misremembering. Aging sucks.

 

[Aaron_W]

Well I read that a couple times. I don't know if it means there's not many, or that there's not much evidence of many, or. Anyhow I would have liked to own one at one point.
That Delta kit looks a lot like the Atlas set up I saw. But the jackshaft was on the table top. Looking at it, I almost wonder if it was a Delta kit I saw, and I'm just misremembering. Aging sucks.

You are probably remembering correctly. You can find the line shaft hardware in a lot of the old catalogs, Sears, Montgomery Ward etc even into the 1950s.

I just know Delta was big on these shop kits in the 1930s so it was easy to find an illustration with one set up, instead of just the hardware.

 

[wa5cab]

I don't know either. It is known that Atlas built over 90,000 10" lathes. I suspect that the lathes had a higher survival rate than did the shapers or horizontal mills.