What is a Shopsmith?

A slightly obscure fact about my background is that I spent a lot of years working for Shop Smith back when they still had retail stores, they had schools attached to the stores and I taught for shop Smith for a number of years. And I've done my share of shop Smith demos and even more obscure because I don't think I've ever told this on anybody before. Part of what got me where I am today was standing in a mall watching a shop Smith get demonstrated and the demonstrator doing the sales person doing a lathe turning and turning a captive ring. And as like a eight year old, I was so intrigued by that process that really planted a seed in my head. So this is unique. I've for a short amount of time got a shops myth in my shop and the video crew is here. So I thought, let's talk about this people. Sometimes when I say shops, they're like, what the heck is a shops? Here we go. This is a shops more specifically, this is a shops myth mark 55, 10, five, Mark five. Is this machine has five different functions and I'm going to walk you through. I'm going to show you how this all comes together here in the heads stock. We've got adjustable speed. We see this kind of speed set up on lathes all the time today. This is a Reeves drive system. So we're currently on the lowest speed. When I turn the dial, it's going to increase and we need that variable speed because it's multi function. It's a table saw drill, press disk, sander, horizontal bo wood lat that I hit all five there. I'm going to show you how this all comes together. So let me unplug. All right, let's make a table saw. Yes. Pretty much. Everything is going to attach using a 5 30 seconds. Allen Wrench, got a saw guard, a saw Arbor with a blade on it, lock and everything in place, the blade, of course, onto the shaft of the motor, the guard onto the quill. Then we should have a table on our table. Yes. And you gotta admit as you watch this, it's very clever how everything comes together. So in order to make this work as a table saw, I'm locking the head stack in place, bring the carriage over, boom, there's a garden and there's a rip fence. There we go. Now looking at that, you say like, oh, ok, that's cool. But the table capacity is maybe a little bit small. They've thought this stuff through because I can do this and that. And lock those rails in place to this. And that gives me an increased capacity for the rip fence because the rip fence can slide out this extension, ok? To give me greater rip capacity. I also have the support of this table here. There are also legs that come with it so that you saw a second ago. The table do a little bit of this. If you're cutting something heavy, I can put legs on these rails to support them out here to take that tip out of now. The cool promise with the shop Smith is it's a lot of stuff in a small package. One of the things that's a little funky about this as a table saw in order to change the height of the blade, we change the height of the table, the depth of cut comes from doing this. So one negative is that in a height where we're cutting three quarter inch stock, it brings the table up kind of high compared to how most table saws work. But in order to get the multi function aspects of it, you gotta live with some shortcomings and some aspects. So table saw, let's undo this 12 inch disk sander. The benefit to having the shroud from the table saw blade is we now have dust collection on the disk sander. And then one of the things that's neat about the way a Smith works is you borrow functions. So for the table saw, we need AM gauge to do cross cuts. When you're using this as a disk sander, we could now use the mitr gauge to sand the end of something perfectly perpendicular because we can take advantage of the M gauge. So that's function number two is the disc standard. I'm just hand tightening. There is a key for that, but for what we're showing here, I don't need it right now. In this mode, we can horizontal bore. Now, horizontal bore allows me, they use this as a dialing machine using the rip fences back up, raise the table until I'm centering the hole. I want to drill on the edge of my stock and I can drill a hole, drill a hole, drill a hole. I could have my next piece on edge like this. So that again with the fences back up, drill a hole drill a hole, drill a hole so that I can accurately drill dial holes in my parts in order to do dial joining. So table saw disk sander, horizontal bore. But wait, there's more you ready for this? Are you ready for this locked, locked? You don't wanna forget that. Ask me how I know. Now we have a conventional drill press and again, with the benefit of the variable speed, the R PM you use on a quarter inch bit is way different than a three quarter or three inch forner bit. So we can dial the speed in depending on exactly what it is that you're doing, you can use the rip fence as back up. So you're controlling hole locations relative to an edge. So again, borrowing functions from one aspect to another is a cool part of the shops. All right. All right. All right. Now, Diana wood lat, same deal. If you own a lathe, you really need variable speed. So that as we go from small spindles to large bowls, we can control that R PM. So table saw dis sander, horizontal bore, vertical drill press wood lathe. It's the big benefit to the shops. Myth is in a pretty small footprint. There are a number of different tools you can still find these today models very similar to this on Craigslist, Facebook marketplace. Um They're maybe not for everyone. The downside to having to change from one tool to another is you have to change from one tool to another. So you definitely need to plan your work and work your plan. So that part way into the drill press function you don't realize. Oh shoot, I have one more piece I needed to cut what the table saw. There are also accessories that will run off of this side of the head stack. There is a shaft that connects them and from there, we can do a plan or a band saw, a belt sander, a scroll saw, there's a whole bunch of stuff that will go into those post holes on the left side and a jointer and, and they can be driven off of the heads stock as well. So a lot of versatility, but again, you know, you got to be willing to do the change over if that matches your woodworking and your space constraints, maybe a shops myth is a cool thing for you. Um Just wanted to take this unique opportunity of me briefly having this in my shop to show you what this machine is all about.