Brown Boggs No. 74 slitting shear

francist

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Thanks for looking!

-frank
 
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