Shaper

Helping Jack move some stuff out of his mom's house yesterday and I noticed this baby shaper* sitting in the corner of the basement. Kinda cute, in a machiny kind of way. Shapers are the original stupid machine tool. I've never understood the rationale behind them. What they do is shave a strip of metal off the top of a block. The top part, the one with the red label on it, is the ram and it just goes back and forth all day long. The cutting bit is fastened to the end (left, in this picture). All the brains, such as they are, are in the table, which moves over just a hair after every stroke of the ram. The idea is you can clamp a block of metal to the table, turn the machine on, and it will plane your block of metal down to the thickness you desire. Eventually. Turn it on and let it run all day long. Here's a YouTube video of one in action.
    Seems to me a band saw and a milling machine would be quicker, but maybe I'm missing something, like you don't need any fancy rotary cutters with a shaper. You can just sharpen up a single tooth and clamp it to the front of the ram and away you go.
    The only time I saw a shaper at work it was working on a two foot thick piece of steel, intent on taking it down to one foot. It was considerable bigger than this one.

*that's a baby-sized shaper, not a machine for shaping babies.