I Wixeyed my Shaper

Just figured I'd share my Wixification of my Delta Shaper. I used Wixeys Portable Planer height gauge, well mostly because I knew from looking at the Shaper that the original height markings would be pretty much obscured by this, and frankly they're kinda crap. The Portable Planer version has a marked height gauge to fall back on. I actually went so far as removing the original, cast in plastic, marking all together, just filed them off and polished the plastic back up.

Stared at this for a long while trying to figure out how to do it, looking through scraps, then ran across my tubing benders and well there you go. The tubing is Aluminum flattened at both ends and blackened with Birchwood/Casey Aluminum Blackener. The top side just mounts to the original pointer mount standoff and the lower is mounted to a thin aluminum plate that mounts to the back of the gauge. I tried to mount it low enough so it had full travel AND hopefully make it more readable given that it's in the shadow of the Shaper top. Success on the first count, not so much on the second. At some point I'll probably need to add some strip lighting under the edge of the top to make it easier to read, but for now a pocket Maglite works.

Another issue is that the original standoff is just a long 1/4-20 screw inside of a tube, nothing really holding it square other then the tension of a single screw. May replace that with a proper hex male/female standoff that I can loctite in place although the way it's mounted to the readout itself doesn't really allow it to move anyway other than straight up and down and the bent tube is pretty stiff, so we'll see.