Back in 94 my dad, RIP, gave me his entire Shopsmith system which he bought in 79 and faithfully upgraded with every release of new parts some of which I am literally still opening "new" to this day. He then bought stand alone tools to duplicate the functions of the SS, most of which I inherited as well when he passed away but that's another story.

The Shopsmith Mark V is a lathe, TS, DP, horizontal bore and a disc sander in its simplest form but with the addition of numerous accessory packages it transforms itself into a 4" jointer, belt sander, strip sander, drum sander, jigsaw, 12" planer, shaper, biscuit joiner and more all driven from its 1-1/8 hp. induction motor driving a CV belt drive with infinitely variable output speed inside of the enclosed powerhead via splined/tapered connectors attached to three output shafts.

Here's a bad pic from in my garage...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...p/PICT0005.jpg

In the foreground is the SS 510 with its rusty bench tubes (sitting in pieces in an unheated space for six years) and the trusty BS mounted on the tail end and table extensions mounted just to put them someplace. Behind it to the left is the stand alone version of their planer called the Pro Planer and to its right are the belt and disc sanders mounted onto a Powerstand which is essentially the same CV drive system as the Mark V for the accessory tools in a smaller stand.

These things are American made, built like tanks and there are all sorts of guys on the net who are still using their Mark Vs that were built in the 50s so they really stand up to time and use like one expects a tool to do. Once again I appologise for the pic but I don't feel like going out and moving those machines from where they are now to shoot new ones. My rant is over.

Thanks, J.R.