No. 182 Extra Heavy Double-Spindle Shaper

The machine

The 182 is what Greenlee built when the 180 was not enough. The two spindles and their opposite rotation are the same idea — swap the work from one to the other and you are always cutting with the grain — but everything around them is scaled up: a table seven feet long, larger motors, and spindle tops made for long slip-on cutter heads instead of stacked collars. There are no belts. Each motor is built directly on its spindle and runs on high-frequency current from a separate frequency changer, which is how the catalog got its 7,200 revolutions a minute.

A cutter head that tall cannot be left standing on its own. Behind each spindle a post bolts to the table, and an arm reaches across to carry a bearing on the very top of the spindle — the “overhead steady bearing” of the catalog. T-slots machined along the front and both ends of the table take bolt-on extension tables for long work, and a row of hooks along the back edge is where those extensions hang when they are not in use.

The one in this collection

This machine carries its name cast into the frame — NO 182, GREENLEE, ROCKFORD ILL — between its two handwheels, above a rocker pedal that stops either motor with a foot. It came with a pair of sixteen-inch, three-knife cutter heads and both steady bearings: one head still standing on its spindle, the other laid out on the table with its arm. The plan is to run it the way it was built to run, with both heads up.