The tiny Adept shapers were made, together with a small lathe, , by a branch of the Portass family, F. W. Portass of Sellers Street, off Abbeydale Road, Sheffield, England , both before and after WW2.  The Adept Models 1A and 2A were both hand-operated and of similar construction, with the 2A being larger and sometimes fitted with an automatic cross feed. The table of the tiny 1A was 4.5" x 4", with vertical T slots 3.5" high, the ram travel was 4". The 2A was considerably bigger with a table 7" x 6" with vertical T slots 6" high and a ram travel of 6.25". During the early 1950s Mr. F .J. Haynes of Audenshaw, Manchester converted his hand-powered Adept No. 2 shaper to incorporate a powered ram; so impressed were Portass by this professional-looking design that they adopted a modified version of it for production. The heart of the alterations was a cleverly arranged casting bolted to the side of the ram guide that carried both pulley and gear shafts - and also performed as a guard to cover the side of the large drive gear. It is possible that some later 2A models may also have been fitted with a "geared down" cross-traverse feed to the head, although this is only a non-too-certain memory of the writer .
With sharp tools it is quite astonishing what a variety of useful work these little machines can do - and in harder times they offered model engineers an economical way of accomplishing tasks that would otherwise have involved a great deal of laborious, and usually inaccurate, hand-filing and cutting. Many of these fine Adepts still fine a use today in the hands of more knowledgeable and skilful enthusiasts. The Adept was also made (or exported to) Australia and marked (like the Adept lathes) as a TNC - and a recent findmay well be one of these models developed to include a powered ram - but of a different design to the English version. Of a rather more robust and complicated nature this machine has yet to be confirmed as a genuine Adept or TNC machine but it certainly bears all the hallmarks of a professional product.