OK, forum registration bug fixed, and I'm now a member!
The best way to get more information about my power feeder is to look at my videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... uZ1e7S3WYe
I'm a rank amateur video maker, but if you have the patience there's a lot of information there. If you want more, contact me through my woodworking web site, alladd.com or email or telephone me.
I fell into this project after seeing this YT video, by the guy who invented the Pantorouter :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPiaduBZHRU
showing a crude one wheeled feeder cobbled together using a brushless motor drill --that actually sort of worked! It just so happened that the last time I had gone to use my baby feeder the speed module was shot and the feed rollers were starting to fall apart. And I hated setting it up --so I didn't use it often. Seeing the drill as-power-source video made me start scheming about making myself a power feeder I'd actualy use.
My prototype worked so well I refined it further, thinking I might try to sell plans for it, maybe even kits. A woodworking friend and neighbor, Tm Coleman, a College of the Redwoods alum who makes great studio furniture and writes often for Fine Woodworking Magazine, saw my prototype and liked it, and then encouraged me to show it at a wood expo at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking, next to a Woodcraft store. Some Fine Woodworking Magazine staff were there and loved it, and told me if I got my supply chain together to fill orders they'd review it for the magazine. Suddenly a new branch of Fine Edge Woodworking.
Delta briefly made a power feeder called the Unifeeder that fence mounted, but it was bulky and didn't really target a coherent market (they said for saws under 3HP, but it fed too fast for them). It's hard to emphasize how excellent the brushless motor drills are as an inexpensive and perfect power source for the feeder (I consider it free because anyone who would want a power feeder should own a brushless motor drill).
I understand the concerns about it being too light. But the way it mounts, like the Unifeeder, gives it a huge leverage advantage over commercial feeders, which operate out on the end of a pivoting lever arm. I think it's more likely to prevent kickback than the baby feeder.
The construction is simple, made mostly from off the shelf parts. There's no especially clever engineering in it. But I did assiduously design for parts I could obtain inexpensively in bulk, and I'm not gouging on the price. You'd have trouble piecing one together yourself for what I charge.
Anyway, I'm glad I discovered this forum, and it got me to think about Shopsmiths for the first time in about 38 years. My first shop, when I was 23, and started to try to make a living selling my woodworking, knowing essentially nothing, was a Taiwan SS clone (Masterwoodcraft!). I have fond memories of turning table lamps from diagonally laminated parquet blocks that were unbalanced. I'd flick on the switch for an instant and then simultaneously hold down the bucking machine and take a few gouge cuts, repeating until it would spin smoothly. After a few months I bought a table saw, and realized I really wasn't much of a turner.
If I ever had to downsize to a small shop I'd get another Shopsmith (the real thing this time!) in a heartbeat. In fact my experience with designing the Little Proteus gives me a far greater appreciation of the engineering and ingenuity of the Shopsmith, and every other tool that works well, as well as a new disdain for every poorly designed fastener in the shop.