Moving a Jones & Shipman Surface Grinder

Martin Berry manages a major machine moving challenge.

I’ve long had a small Herbert Junior surface grinder, which is rather limited in its capability and capacity although it had been a good introduction to the peculiarities of surface grinding. For some time, I’d dreamt of something a little bigger with a bit more sophistication and the ubiquitous Jones & Shipman 540 seemed to be the obvious next step, but surface grinders do not come cheap and, unlike my lathe which has certainly earned its keep, a surface grinder is somewhat a luxury, so the dream remained just that until one day I spied upon an advert for one going for an advantageous price not more than 50 miles away. Initial enquiries concluded that it was an earlier model and not quite so powerful as the later models; this suited me as it would not stretch my 3 HP 3 phase converter.

Cutting a long story short, a satisfactory demonstration proved it produced good results and purchase was agreed on the basis that delivery could be procured at a reasonable cost. The machine’s owner, fortunately, had contacts in the trade and, for a sum no more than it would have cost me to hire a van and collect it, it was delivered a few weeks later as a cash-in-hand “part load” looking quite small on the back of a large flat-bed truck. I’d once bought a Harrison milling machine and collected it using a pallet truck and a tail-lift van. For reasons I will not go into here, it was not an exercise I would not to repeat; so the aforementioned delivery was a pleasant experience.