Lots of stuff about the joys of having and using a lathe lately, how about mills? Very handy tool, especially if one also has a lathe. I went to a sale yesterday, the gent has quite a shop set up in his two-car garage and was selling some extra stuff. Picked up a nice Kurt mill vise (he had 4 for sale!) for $150 to replace my Japanese copy, a couple nice HD live centers, and a precision MT3 taper drill chuck. Any interesting mil projects going on, or new tooling or gadgets found? Mine is a 1951 Bridgeport that is in decent shape, with an Enco power feed
I have a J-Head Bridgeport, with a Kurt vice, and a Nichols horizontal, that comes in handy at times.
I am all about a vertical mill. For anyone looking, if you can get one with at-least an X power feed, and a decent digital read out (DRO). Adding those later can get spendy. A lot of old-school guys like to read the dials and do the math. A modern DRO will do that for you, and does not make mistakes, like I do.
The lab I worked at before I retired has a Wilton knee mill, a decent copy of a Bridgeport for the money. We bought it to make widgets and gizmos for our experimental setups in the emissions lab. It's 50 miles away, and I miss being able to make stuff for the Whatever project on it. Also had 2 lathes, a Wilton 13 inch late 90s bought same purpose, and a vintage WW2 ex navy South Bend. Sorry to say its probably a Chinese something or other now. We had to move it, but unfortunately we dropped it on its side. It busted up kind of bad. By the end of the day it was just a pile of scrap in a scrapyard in the Port of Albany. That was 4 years ago. I'm keeping my eyes open for a mill and a lathe for my garage. Maybe some day...
I have a small and rare #3 Rockford Hand Miller that has a normal vertical head, but also has a horizontal slotting head. Even has a mechanical power feed, a driveshaft down the side from the rear belt drive. It has a drive with a motor which is bad, need to get that little critter going http://www.lathes.co.uk/rockfordmillers/
Ever notice that everything had style back then? My wife has a treadle Singer sewing machine and even that has style. What happened to us?
Slotting heads are pretty cool, but I cannot use mine. I have a DoAll Bridgeport copy, and my genuine Bridgeport slotting head does not fit on it. It is supposed to go on the eyelet on the backside, opposite the regular head. For some reason, the vertical measurement on my mill is slightly too big. I'd sell it off, but the market for these things is pretty small.
I picked up a gennie Bridgeport boring bar kit, in it's original box, neat old sh#^. There were quite a few old-school retired Mare Island machinists out in my hood, so garage/ estate sales are treasure hunts. I picked up a triple Kennedy box/rollaway from one, still has decals all over them from the different nuke subs he worked on- and of course the boxes were full. One had made custom gun barrels in his basement shop- another had a precision 4-jaw chuck that he built from scratch. Another showed me the value of using newsprint with the mill- just incredible accuracy with the old manual machines. An old friend (RIP) was a legend in the V-twin bike world- Alan Sputhe. The stuff that guy would dream up and build just to see if he could do it was awesome. He had a Harley Twin Cam engine sitting in front of his desk that he converted to chain-drive SOHC- just for giggles
After my father passed away I just couldn’t sell the mill or lathe but not having a shop of my own I did the most logical thing I put them in my basement. The ultimate man cave Now I put the mill on a slow feed and shoot some pool or relax on my sofa J head Bridgeport early Central machinery (hf) x power feed ( haven’t seen this in catalog for a while) DRO Mitutoyo DRO on the quell DC motor controller WWll Sebastian navy lathe also DC motor controller 6’ bed
^^ interesting... Have not seen a slotting head that mounts to a quill. We had a Volstro rotary milling head for a BP. Kinda light duty, but did the work at the time. CNC pretty much obsoleted those. We also had a BP slotting head that mounted to the back "eye". It worked great. Made some prototype aluminum PD pulleys for Goodyear PD belts that were to go on Harley Davidson motorcycles. This was to take the place of chains. IIRC, Gates ended up being the main supplier. But Goodyear got some of the business too. @gimpyshotrods could you mill out the opening on the "clevis" a bit to make it fit? IMO, it wouldn't "ruin" it; just make it more practical.
It's not so easy to find Bridgeports in the desert...but I got an old import copy of one. And it has real Bridgeport optical scales on the table, which is really nice.
There is no end to the tooling available for a knee mill, and you can spend money in a hurry. My buddies must feel sorry for me, another friend gave me an Albrecht chuck. You can make tool changes, fast, with a hand tightening unit.
That is the on-quill one. There is a big one that hangs on the back. I have that one. It is quite large. Not my setup, as I cannot mount mine. Shown opposite the conventional head.
I suppose. It is a removable piece. Of course, someone is selling that exact part on eBay right now, for not that much, too.
I have a friend with the rear mounting unit. He cut some inside splines in a V-8 quickchange coupler for me.
I thought I had enough machinery to last me for many moons but that was not so. The lady that runs the shop where I work came up with the ultimate tool the other day. It is a stainless steel can for keeping dirty shop rags in. It has a digital self opening lid that opens when you toss a rag at it. It swallows the rag and then closes. Another wonder of the century. Now if I could find a machine to empty the can and wash the rags automatically..........
Man! Me and my little mini mill feel kinda inadequate here! Ain't built alot of big stuff but lots of gun parts!
@Flat Roy ha ! The ol' Bandit control; that’s what I learned on back in the 70s It was on an English “Beaver” mill. (insert joke here) The company that sold it to us provided a small cassette tape deck that was to be used for program storage, but damn thing never worked right, so it was all MDI whenever some new part was run. Made a lot of parts on it. It was joined by a Bridgeport Boss 6 later on. Then Haas CNC Lot of differences. @chevyfordman is that a Wilton? Looks nice. I’ve had a DoAll mill w Sony Magnascale DROs & Kurt vise for many years at home. It’s a BP clone as well and does all a manual mill should do However it’s not as pretty as yours.
Wish I had a mill. Mine is a poor man’s mill…a drill press with an xy vise. As long as Im creative and go slow I can almost make acceptable parts.
ha ! The ol' Bandit control; Boy that's for sure. What a miserable control. Fortunately I was able to trickle programs into it from my computer. Could not load very large programs and usually took as long to load as it did to run, Ugh. But the mill was a sweetheart, big and tough and accurate to .001. The Cnc router is not as accurate (almost) but have run an 8hour program (loads in a couple of minutes) non stop on it with no errors and no editing,. One big plus, can't make a very big mess with it.
I bought mine some 20 years ago,can`t find a name on it,but it is very old. Converted from "beltdrive" to electric.
Here's mine. It's an Adcock-Shipley Bridgeport. These were built by Adcock-Shipley ( a machine tool manufacturer) under license in England. Eventually, the Adcock Shipley company was bought by Textron (Bridgeport's owners) and the Brit built machines lost the Adcock Shipley labelling. Mine came from a technical college when they started to major on CNC, so it hasn't seen too much use, but does have a few 'badge of incompetence' marks on the table.
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