As shown on another page on this web site, I picked up an American Type Founders Saw Trimmer and have started fixing it up a bit. While researching the web for info on it, I corresponded with several folks who recommended the Hammond Trim-O-Saw as a better saw for accurate cutting of small stock. I started looking around for one and came upon an Ebay listing for this Hammond G4B. The price went a little higher than was budgeted but it was "only" 300 miles away so it seemed worth bidding a little more as freight wouldn't be involved. It ended up selling for around $250 and a friend agreed to pick it up for me during a trip near the seller's location.
It seems to be in decent condition, except for a bit of surface rust here and there. It weighs around 400-450 pounds, about 200 pounds more than the ATF saw. The Hammond table slides on ball bearings, as opposed to the inverted V-ways of the ATF saw, which should provide less sliding friction and is one of the main advantages over the ATF saw.
Here's the saw as delivered to me. The 3-phase motor (not shown), table, belt guard, and blade raising mechanism were removed by the seller to make loading it into my friend's van easier. The base is fairly easy to lift, but the table is quite a bit heavier. The saw originally included a "chip truck" which was a metal bin on casters that was rolled under the saw in the rectangular opening at the front of the base to collect swarf from sawing operations. The chip truck seems to have gone AWOL on this saw.
A view from the rear of the saw, showing the motor mounting plate and a better view of the table raising mechanism The saw guard is an aluminum casting and had been broken in two places but seems to have been repaired well.
The name plate, which shows a few of the patent numbers for the saw, it's model number (G4B) and serial number (6395). It was apparently sold by Western Newspaper Union.
The patent numbers date from 1937 and 1947, so the saw probably dates from 1948 or later.
There
is another little name plate riveted to the saw table, which suggests that it was
owned at one time by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The seller purchased
the saw from a government auction so it may have been originally purchased by
BIA.
Installing the Table on the Base - May 22, 2005
There were several things that need attention the saw, including the surface rust in various areas, the ball races for the sliding table, and the arbor bearings, which spin OK but are a little "bumpy". When the saw was delivered we placed the table assembly on a 4-wheel dolly made of 2x4s and casters. The table was a little tippy , due to components that protrude down from the bottom of the table which made it difficult to work on it and its components so I decided to get it mounted on the base.
The saw base was mounted on a Grizzly G7314 Heavy Duty Shop Fox mobile base to make it easier to stow it out of the way in our 2-car garage when it's not being used. Grizzly sells several models with different weight and footprint capacities and this one has a capacity of 700 lbs. They all seem to be fabricated of heavy gauge rectangular tubing with 4 side pieces that telescope into rectangular tubing at the corners. The corner tubes have a series of clearance holes drilled for metric cap screws and the inner tubes have matching holes that are drilled and tapped for the screws. The width and length can be adjusted by sliding the inner tubes inside the corner tubes to match the hole patterns on each. IMHO, the quality of the Shop Fox leaves a bit to be desired - the threads on one of the screws stripped when I got a bit too aggressive tightening it, even though I was just using a a short handled socket wrench. Looks like the cap screws are the typical Chinese crap and will need upgrading.
Here a couple of lifting straps have been wrapped around the table assembly and and attached to a Pep Boys engine hoist to get the table lifted up to the saw base, which is already mounted on the Shop Fox. Some care was taken to ensure that the straps were wrapped around solid casting so as to avoid bending or damaging any lighter table components like the back table pivot. The fence, saw blade, and batter/line up gauge were removed to avoid damaging them. In hindsight, it would probably have been better to have removed the sliding table as well because the lifting straps did bear on it a bit and sliding table made mounting the table casting more difficult than it had to be..
The table has been lifted part way up and this shot shows the under side. As can be seen, there is quite a bit of rust under there and that will have to be dealt with soon.
The table is being lowered to the base. The table is attached with (3) 3/8-16 SHCS through counter bored holes under the sliding table in the main table casting with opposing pairs of spherical washers between the base and the underside of the table casting. The SHCS are threaded into tapped holes in the saw base. These were apparently used to allow the 3 bearing points to pivot slightly to account for imperfections in the planarity of the flats machined in the base and table underside at each bearing point. That's a nice design touch, assuming I understand the purpose correctly. In any case, the washers made it a bit difficult to get the table installed on the base because the washer sets have to be laid on the base with the table elevated and the table then has to be oriented so that counter bored holes line up with the threaded holes in the base so that the SHCS can be threaded into the base. A cardinal rule of rigging is to avoid getting any body part under a rigged part that may drop or shift with little warning. To avoid injury to fingers the table was lowered onto a 2x6 and a smaller piece of plastic (not shown) that were placed on the base as spacers and oriented to allow clear access to the three threaded holes in the base. Once the table was stable, the washer pairs were laid over the threaded holes in the base. The process of getting the SHCS installed was a bit tedious because the spacers were too thick and it was necessary to use longer SHCS to get them started in the tapped holes. A long SHCS was started into one location to anchor that pair of holes and the table was then lifted slightly at the opposite end and swung about slightly to located SHCSs in the remaining holes. The table was then lifted to just clear the base and the thick spacers were replaced with thinner spacers so that the long SHCS could be replaced, one at a time with the correct length. This would have been much easier if the sliding table had been removed as it had to be moved from one extreme of travel to the other to get access to all of the mounting holes. Live and learn! At least I'll know better when it comes time to pull the table again to clean the rust from its bottom.
The saw seems to be stable on the Shop Fox and it will now be much easier to start pulling components for inspection and cleaning.
Checking Out the Arbor - May 23, 2005
The arbor was a bit stiff and felt bumpy when rotating it by hand, so it seemed a good idea to check out the bearings and probably replace them.
Here's a view of the arbor housing from the front of the saw...
... and another from the rear. The SHCS seen here fix the housing to a pivot arm. I tried to separate the housing from the arm by loosening the SHCS, but they were really tight and resisted a liberal dose of PB Blaster, so it was on to Plan B - removal of the components on the arbor to gain access to the bearings inside the housing. The plated fitting at the RH side of the front view is apparently a mounting flange for a grinding wheel that was mounted on the end of the arbor. It came free with a little help from PB Blaster.
Once the wheel flange was removed, a pulley nut was revealed, which holds the pulley on the arbor. The pulley is keyed to the arbor with a Woodruff key. A pin spanner is required to unscrew the pulley nut from the arbor and I don't yet have a set of these, so I made one from a piece of aluminum stock and a couple of 1/8" dowel pins.
Here's the shop made pin spanner - crude, but effective.
The pin spanner in place and ready to remove the nut. A liberal dose of PB Blaster and a couple of wacks with a dead blow hammer on teh edge of teh spanner were enough to free the nut. Hammond thoughtfully machined a hex boss on the end of the arbor to provide of means of fixing the arbor while the spanner is rotated to loosen the nut.
The arbor housing with wheel flange, pulley nut, and pulley removed.
The outboard bearing is now visible and there is another one at the other end of the housing. The bearings are Fafnir 205PP which is a common bearing, I believe. There's also a bearing retainer screw visible that threads into the housing and another at the opposite end. These are locked into position with set screws and brass plugs through the top of the housing. Another shop-made pin spanner will be required to remove this, and of course it's a different size than the one needed for the pulley nut.
Removing the Arbor Bearings - May 25, 2005
Well this turned out to be a little more difficult than I'd expected. I made up a crude pin spanner and the bearing retainer screw came out pretty easily but the arbor and bearings were quite a bit more reluctant to come out. More PB Blaster and many whacks with a dead blow hammer got the arbor out eventually. There's a tube inside the arbor housing that serves as a spacer between the two bearings. The spacer is a loose fit over the arbor, but the ID is close enough to the ID of the inner bearing races that I couldn't figure out a way to grip the inner race to pull the bearing out. The ID of the housing is a shade over 2" and I ended up inserting a 2" diameter of Delrin rod into the blade side of the housing and used that as a ram to push the outboard bearing out with the assistance of a dead blow hammer. The bearing spacer was then removed and the blade-side bearing was pushed out from the other side with the Delrin rod and dead blow hammer. There are probably more professional ways to remove the bearings but I've never learned them.
Here's the arbor housing with the arbor and other internal components removed. The inside looks pretty free of rust.
These are all of the arbor components, laid out roughly in the order of assembly. The plate in the upper right hand corner is the pin spanner made from some scrap aluminum plate and a couple of 1/8" dowel pins.
The tube in the center, just below the arbor, is the bearing spacer, which apparently fixes the distance between the bearings.
To the left of that is blade-side bearing, a snap ring thingy that fits into grooves in the inner and out races at the face of the bearing, and the bearing retainer screw. The two small objects above the retainer screw are a set screw and pad that screw into a hole in the arbor housing to fix the retainer position. The pad drops into the set screw hole in the arbor housing to protect the retainer threads from damage by the set screw. To the right of the bearing spacer is a identical set of parts for the out board bearing. Above that is the pulley nut, pulley, and grinding wheel nut.
One of the bearings seems to be in reasonably good shape, but the other is definitely rough. New bearings were ordered from Motion Industries ($16+ each) and I'll pick those up and install them in a couple of days.
This is the arbor assembly. Thanks to a tip from crzypete in the Hammond Glider forum on the MachineJunkie web site, I discovered that the hex boss at the of the arbor is actually the end of a drawbar for the saw head. The saw head seems to be in pretty good condition, notwithstanding a bit of paint that somehow got dribbled on it a some point.
The web site can be found here: MachineJunkie
A friend will probably drop by this weekend, bringing a 1.25 HP DC motor and controller so that the saw can be checked out under power. After that it will probably be time to check out the sliding table ball bearings and do something about the rust on various parts of the saw.
Cleaning the Table Top - May 27, 2005
The table top is pretty rusty - no pits to speak of but a fairly thick layer of surface rust. A small area was sprayed with WD-40 and rubbed with a fine/medium grade of abrasive pad and seemed to clean up pretty well without any deep scratches so the rest of the top was cleaned the same way. This wasn't particularly difficult, although it did take several hours of rubbing and half a box of paper towels to sop up the rust/WD-40 muck in between applications. It might have been a better idea to take it to a local sand blaster.
Here's the top after the sliding table was cleaned. The fixed part of the table hasn't been done yet and makes a nice contrast. The cleaned part of the table is now much smoother than before the rust was removed, but there are definite patterns from the rubbing. There is an outline of a number that was apparently paint penned onto the fixed part of the table, presumably as an auction item number. Too bad the entire table was coated in whatever was used to paint the number as the metal under the number looks unaffected by the rust.
Bead Blasted Parts - May 28, 2005
A friend has a nice sand blasting cabinet, so I dropped by there today to use it on some of the smaller parts from the saw. We used a medium grade glass bead and it worked pretty well on the parts.
These are the parts from the arbor assembly. The rest of the table has been cleaned but it could still need a bit more work.
Miscellaneous parts for the batter, table raising mechanism, swarf deflector, and belt guard. These looked pretty good after blasting but the camera shows that there is still some light rust on a few of the parts.
Partially Assembled - May 31, 2005
Another friend dropped by yesterday to loan me a 1-HP, 0-2500 rpm DC motor and controller and we installed the arbor, including new bearings. The bearings were pressed onto the arbor with an arbor press and a small pipe used as a block. I neglected to install the inner bearing retainer so we had to pull the bearings off again and re-install them. That required pressing the inner bearing off at the outer race. That's a big no-no, but we couldn't see any other option and the bearing seemed to be fine after the second re-assembly.
The DC motor has the correct OD shaft (3/4") for the motor pulley, but the mounting legs and other dimensions on the DC motor were different than the original 3-phase motor that came with the saw. The DC motor shaft was about 1-3/8" closer to the plane of the mounting legs and the mounting slots on the legs had a different pattern. Consequently a motor adapter plate was required to position the motor shaft horizontally and vertically so that the motor pulley would aligned in the correct orientation. The design of the adapter plate was dictated by the stock on hand and consists of a 3/8" aluminum plate bolted to the saw mounting plate and a couple of 1" aluminum riser blocks.
This is a simplified depiction of the 3-phase motor on the saw mounting plate.
This a 3-D rendering of the design used for the DC motor. The 3/8" adapter plate is bolted to the saw mounting plate at the 4 corner holes and has 4 tapped holes to match the slot pattern on the DC motor mounting legs. The plate extends about an inch to the left of the saw mounting plate to position the motor pulley in the same plane as the arbor pulley. The motor sits on top of two 1" riser blocks so that the motor pulley would be located at the same distance from the saw mounting plate as the pulley on the original 3-phase saw motor. This arrangement allowed the pulley on the DC motor to be located so that it fit inside the belt guard.
The DC motor was then installed and the fence and finger were gone over with WD-40 and medium abrasive pads to remove rust. The fence lead screw was mounted in a 5C collet with a live center in the tailstock so that it could be cleaned under power.
A picture of the DC motor and riser blocks installed on the adapter and saw mounting plates.
The G4B is now operational, although the old 3-phase wiring needs to be removed and the DC motor controller needs to be mounted on the saw and wired to the on/off switch on the front of the saw.
The ATF Saw Trimmer can be seen in the background. Yet another project - sigh...
A view of the saw from the rear.
Last edited: 07/23/2005