I bought a thrift store Williams & Hussey

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Sourwould

New User
Taylor
Having kind of a "now what?" moment. I'd love to keep and use this machine, but lacking real shop space and access to 220 is a real hurdle. This is pretty much my thrift store find of the year, so I thought y'all might enjoy.

IMG_20201004_124045.jpg
 
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Oka

Casey
Corporate Member
Cool ! clean it up and get it bqack to factory spec. Then, if it was me I would use it as a moulding cutter, awesome find
 
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Sourwould

New User
Taylor
No knives with it. I have access to knives though. Plus there a local place that makes them.

This is probably a better planer than my actual planer.
 
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S

Sourwould

New User
Taylor
awldune said:
What kind of cutters does a machine like that use? Are they the same as for a shaper?
Click to expand...

They look like planer knives. Just high speed steel. I was looking on the W&H website, and they do have a shaper head available. Though I'm not sure why that's an advantage.

This is not a great picture (it was dark), but here's a shot of one of the cutter walls at Garland in Durham. These are not for a W&H, but it's a similar knife.
IMG_20200925_124208.jpg


They're used in this giant machine, which is as big as my car.
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chris_goris

Chris
Senior User
Actually, any of those knives you see with the holes in them you can run in that machine as long as theyre not over 7" I believe. There are several different cutterheads for large moulders like that antique pictured. There are "widow makers" and serrated edge steel cutters. The widow makers apparently used to lose the cutters during use and impale shop personnel. I have a few of these for my shaper. All the newer machines use serrated steel. The serrations hold the into the cutterhead and are also used for indexing the cutters radially. the real advantage a W&H type moulder has is it will do curved mouldings, all you have to do is make your blank whatever shape and run it through a special jig they have with wheels to hold the blank as its being fed through. Thats a dying art now since they now sell flexible mouldings in many profiles. Although I think a W&H is still required for eliptical mouldings.
 
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Sourwould

New User
Taylor
I'm pretty sure those cutters have a different bolt pattern for larger bolts, those cutters are really big and thick.

The cutters I've seen called widow makers were a friction fit.

I think the real bread and butter for this kind of machine is the ability to reproduce unavailable trim profiles for historical restoration/remodel. All in a small package that doesn't require a crane to move and is in budget for a small operation.

Even when "matching" historical trim to what's currently available, the newer profe is flatter (if that makes sense). I guess it's to save wood.

Plus you can have your trim in whatever flavor you want. We recently reproduced some column base in KDAT for a porch trim out and some crown in acoya (not sure in that spelling) for a widow's walk.
 
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junquecol

Bruce
Senior User
Tom Silva of This Old House has one of these machines. For a short run of molding, you can use just one knife, and a counter balance blank in the other slot. For $95 did you use a gun, or a bazooka?
 
srhardwoods

srhardwoods

New User
Chris
I have been running one for quite a while. Impressive machines and you can produce moldings quickly. You can build eliptical jigs for curved moldings as well. Limitation is they can not do more than 3/4" depth of cut. One of the largest moldings I've run is the chicago bar rail

 
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