It will work either hard or soft wood with facility, at speeds varying from 5 feet to 25 feet per minute, and is especially useful to railway carriage builders, tryingup scantling for joiners' work, &c. It also has the advantage that a number of pieces may be planed at one time.

The travelling table is fitted with screw cramps or 'dogs,' which securely fix the wood being operated on. A graduated index is fitted to the slide on which the cutter block works, so that the thickness of the cut can easily be adjusted to gauge.

An improvement has latterly been introduced in the machine under notice, which enables it to plane both ways of the traverse; consequently no time is lost in running back the table for a fresh cut, as in other machines of the same class. The cutters are fitted to a steel cutter-block, and, in addition to planing, can be arranged to cut large mouldings, trenches, rebates, &c. Pressure rollers to keep the wood steady whilst under the operation of the cutters are fixed immediately in front and at the rear of the cutter block; these rollers are fitted with india-rubber washers, which give and allow for any inequality on the surface of the timber being planed. Vertical side-cutters can be fixed to these machines when required for edging and matching, &c., and in the largest sized machines the cutter block can be raised or lowered by means of a simple selfacting motion worked from a countershaft.

CHAPTER XII.

IRREGULAR MOULDING AND SHAPING MACHINES.

MACHINES for moulding and shaping circular or irregular forms in wood are of comparatively recent introduction; they, however, effect great economy, as compared with hand labour, in the production of irregular ornamental work, as used in church architecture, &c. They are specially well adapted for working in hard woods, and will produce a large amount of work sufficiently perfect to require little or no finishing by hand. They can also be used to advantage for moulding ships' timbers, straight or circular cornice mouldings, table and side-board tops, chair and sofa frames, &c. ; and when not in use for irregular work, they can be used for straight, such as sticking architrave mouldings, sash bars, stop-chamfering, grooving, rebating, thicknessing, &c. In fact, from the range and variety of its work, it must be considered a most valuable machine. A patent for shaping irregular forms was taken out in 1820 by one Boyd, but the method of moulding or shaping irregular forms in wood by means of a cutter block fixed on a spindle revolving vertically was invented and patented by Mr. Andrew Gear, of Jamesville, Ohio, U.S.A., in the year 1853. The machine he then constructed is similar in every respect to those now in

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use. In the first machines made two steel spindles were employed, arranged to revolve in opposite directions; these were fitted in bearings lined with antifriction metal and protruded through the top of a wooden table. The top of the spindles were screwed, and the cutters, of which there were two to each spindle, were kept in their places by collars and nuts. Both flat and curved cutters were employed; the shoulders of the cutter spindles and the under side of the collars were bevel-grooved, and the edge of the cutters made to correspond. They were thus held firmly in their places. A fence for sticking straight mouldings and a carriage fitted with chucks for 'pine-apple work' were added. For producing 'pine-apple work' the wood was made to revolve by turning the chucks first in one direction and then in another, and any degree of expanding pitch or twist on a screw-shaped table leg or other ornament was obtained by leaving the chucks free to revolve, and prolonging the extremity of one or both, the extremity being squared and twisted into the required shape and allowed to play endwise through an eye in the fixed standard. The inventor, it seems, made the discovery by accident, the first machine being constructed for one kind of work, and the extent of its range and easy adaptability to cut irregular and intricate mouldings was for some time undiscovered. Unlike many others, the inventor is said to have made large sums of money by the sale of his patents.

Storer and Bicknell, of Boston, U.S.A., patented some additional improvements in 1856. These consisted chiefly of an improved method of fastening the cutters and a self-acting method of setting the cutter spindles to angle for forming undercut mouldings. This was per