Hobby use? Only if "hobby" means "sweatshop".
I own one of these -- it's a Nichols, not a VN, it's the same machine with an exposed motor -- and I've run one very much like it.
The horizontal handle in front of the table is a lever for moving the table left and right, no cranks. Machines like this were used in mass production, typically did just one operation to each of a whole bunch of parts. Probably pretty boring, but it was a job.
+1 nail on head. The wooden handle moves the table a foot or more in 180deg of swing. So this is kind of like a skillsaw. There is always a mill fixture to hold the parts and the parts are seldom run one at a time, usually a gang of parts. Load up parts; swing the handle; chips fly everywhere; swing the handle back; unload parts; repeat. All mine were aluminum. Hundreds of parts in an 8 hour shift. If it sounds like a galley slave job, you'd be about right.
Now why would i own one? Well, first i got it cheap. Second, I'll be doing the sorts of jobs this is designed for. Like cutting down .223 brass to .300aac length 20 at a time. Stuff like that. Haven't run the first load yet but that's the plan. The other thing this is good for is stuff like key slots or similar vertical slotting because the whole head will plunge to depth using the upper handle.
On mine, there's a double stem near the wooden handle. (My wooden handle is long since gone.) One stem is for the quicky function like we just discussed. The other is a genuine X axis crank. There's a little bolted fitting under the table to engage/disengage the pinion from the X axis screw. In that config, it's just a strangely small, hand-crank, horizontal, with a single T-slot and plunging head.
The other thing i wanted to do to mine is make a surface grinder of it. The overarm comes out easy. Was gonna mount a motor and wheel there. Mine has coolant sump so all i'd need is a splash shield and it would grind things "flat". Not reference flat of course, but flat-ish. So no, i wouldn't go crazy on the setup and building of it, but i think it'd be handy to have.
Anyway, lots of imaginative potential. These are good production machines for the kind of slasher jobs you might imagine. In machine-rich Ohio, I don't see it worth $1K, but out here in flyover country, sure, a guy could get a kilobuck of use out of one, IMO.
Wrat
