# Brown Boggs  No. 74 slitting shear



## francist (Apr 22, 2019)

I just finished tuning up my new (to me) slitting shear. I got it a few weeks ago and while it wasn't in really bad shape I gave it a once-over anyway.




Replaced the fasteners, made new shim washers to tighten up some of the side play, freshened up the edges on the blades, and gave it some new paint. This bluish-green isn't the factory original paint as far as I can tell -- I think that was a dark charcoal colour -- but it is the shop colour scheme from the school where it was retired from and the one that I also remember from there. So that's what I matched to, complete with the "here's the handle part...." in safety yellow.




They call this a bench shear and it's supposed to be mounted on a bench, but I don't have the free space to dedicate a bench spot for it. So I came up with a small pedestal stand. It's just big enough to hold the shear, has some appliance casters for wheeling around if necessary, and I can use the open base for storing a small selection of mostly shim stock and offcuts. It's actually the stand from an old vertical woodworking bandsaw that I scrapped years ago, but it turned out to be a perfect height for something like the shear. All I did was channel it so that it wasn't quite as boxy and added the MDF shelf and top.




The shear itself cuts like a dream. I mean, effortlessly slices through 20ga steel sheet as easy as paper. According to the original Brown Boggs specification, this model was rated up to 3/16" mild steel but I know I'll never push it to that anymore. Still, it makes short work of 1/8" aluminum.







Thanks for looking!

-frank


----------



## markba633csi (Apr 23, 2019)

Great find, that.  Nice little stand too


----------

