Milling Machine desire resulting in insanity need advice...

[smokeywolf]

Beautiful mill Buckshot. I wouldn't dare own a white or ivory colored machine. Even my battleship grey Bridgeport looks in desperate need of a good cleaning. Anilam/Accu-Rite are great DRO units. I've found DRO on the quill to be much more advantageous than DRO on the knee.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I've moved many 1,015 lb Mosler safes by using three pipes or metal conduit for rollers.

Depending on where you have to pick up the load, and how big the door to your shop is; look into renting a forklift or tractor with a loader, maybe even a Bobcat.

Truck with a Tommy-Lift tailgate?

Robert

A figure which strikes a chill into my heart. Long, long ago a foundry that was supposed to be sending me a 600lb. keel-shaped boat keel sent me a 1050lb. rectangular keel by mistake. They dropped it where it was in everybody's way, and I got it to the far end of the boatyard, to wait for the replacement, in pretty much the way you describe. Of course I was younger then.

Here is one of my projects, the piece of D2 air hardening steel which will someday be the ultimate Cadet Martini. The full-depth rectangular slot I had cut by wire electrical discharge machining, but the extension to one end was milled on what many would consider a pathetic little mini-mill, and is true to .002in. with the EDM slot, bottom and sides. If you are unburdened by the necessity to do things at a speed you can earn a living by, any mill is better than no mill, and the least can earn its keep if you work within its limitations.

[oldred]

any mill is better than no mill, and the least can earn its keep if you work within its limitations.

You bet it is! I have a little benchtop mill, a Seig x2 type that I built an 1885 Highwall receiver on starting with a 1 1/2 x 3x 8 block of 4140HT. This was a couple of years ago just before I got my Bridgeport clone but that little mill is still with me and it still gets used quite a bit. The first two receivers on the completed rifles I did were done on a lathe with a milling attachment and I can say from experience that even that little mill is orders of magnitude better than the milling attachment on the lathe! If someone needs a mill and due to money or space, or both, they can't swing a full size mill that little Seig or one of it's many cousins with a different nameplate can do a fantastic job as long as a person is willing to work within it's limits, I would not hesitate to buy another one if it was the only mill I could afford or had room for. They need a few mods but nothing complected or expensive and even after obtaining my full size mill I still find that thing handy as a shirt pocket and I wouldn't want to part with it. Building something like a rifle receiver and all the related parts takes longer on the little mill vs a big one of course but as long as the operator respects the limitations of the little one the finished part will not know the difference.


Same as this one,

http://www.thefishnet.com/wood/ms/ve...14jul05015.jpg


That's the Harbor Freight version and I saw one in like new condition go for $275 US about two months ago.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

You bet it is! I have a little benchtop mill, a Seig x2 type that I built an 1885 Highwall receiver on starting with a 1 1/2 x 3x 8 block of 4140HT. This was a couple of years ago just before I got my Bridgeport clone but that little mill is still with me and it still gets used quite a bit. The first two receivers on the completed rifles I did were done on a lathe with a milling attachment and I can say from experience that even that little mill is orders of magnitude better than the milling attachment on the lathe! If someone needs a mill and due to money or space, or both, they can't swing a full size mill that little Seig or one of it's many cousins with a different nameplate can do a fantastic job as long as a person is willing to work within it's limits, I would not hesitate to buy another one if it was the only mill I could afford or had room for. They need a few mods but nothing complected or expensive and even after obtaining my full size mill I still find that thing handy as a shirt pocket and I wouldn't want to part with it. Building something like a rifle receiver and all the related parts takes longer on the little mill vs a big one of course but as long as the operator respects the limitations of the little one the finished part will not know the difference.


Same as this one,

http://www.thefishnet.com/wood/ms/ve...14jul05015.jpg


That's the Harbor Freight version and I saw one in like new condition go for $275 US about two months ago.

The only difference is that mine, marketed in the UK under the name Chester by a proper machine tool supplier with a good parts service, is yellow.

We have heard a lot of good advice in this thread to go large, which it would be foolish for a professional gunsmith to ignore. But for the amateur who simply isn't going to do that, or who might do it in a year or two if things work out for him, a mini-mill is a valid way to go. For the total novice it does have the advantage that tool abuse, which a professional would intuitively select speed and feed to avoid, is more easily detectable by sound and slowing. My friends call mine my sight mill. But I look sometimes at my Parker-Hale Lee-Enfield receiver sight, from the days when military rifle with no scope and no permanent modifications was the target discipline in the UK, and I reflect that it would make one of those as well as any mill can. As they routinely sell for over £100 nowadays, you don't have to do many jobs like that to pay for the machine. With a basic indexing fitment you could mill and grind reamers too.

They are easily abused, and I'm told that the nylon gears in the head can fail, but that was a 5/8in. end mill for my job, not too timidly used, and they are fine. They are easily obtainable, and far better than a burnt out motor. There is also some kind of overload cutout switch, too rapid to be thermal. Just out of curiosity I measured those gears, and read up on the module system for gear specification in Wikipedia. You can get gears on eBay if the source ever dries up.

Your 1885 receiver sounds like a fascinating project. Somebody has to do it! I would have thought sharp corners in the breechblock recess ought to be broached, or in my case EDM eroded. (A broaching firm I consulted only had 20mm. and 3/4in. square broaches, and could only do it to less than double the size of the square.) I suppose if you mill it, finishing up with a small enough diameter mill to leave plenty of flat bearing surface, the corners could be filed. But in my case the slot was only 18.5mm. wide, and deeper than for the 1885. I think you would have to use too long and thin an end mill to work well.

[oldred]

Actually it's relatively easy to square those corners, when I did the first one that part was my major concern but it turns out to have been much ado about little. What I did was drill a 5/8 hole at the proper angle then get it as close as possible with a long 1/4 end mill leaving the 1/8 radius corners to be filed. I rigged up a simple filing guide and then using the finished to size breech block and layout fluid to show high spots I was able to get a super close fit that slides easily with no detectable slop, proper riffler files here makes this job go MUCH easier! The second one, a scaled down version of the high wall, was done exactly the same way but on the third one I started with the 5/8 hole again but that time I roughed it out with a long 5/16 end mill first then only used the 1/4 mill to finish the corners. If anyone wants to try this I highly recommend using both the 5/16 and 1/4 end mills because while the 1/4 will get the job done it does so much more slowly and makes maintaining the proper tolerance a lot harder to do.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

That is pretty inspirational stuff, and it would be hard to get through life without a mill after hearing of such things. As I said, I think that method wouldn't be quite so well suited to the depth of slot that I wanted. Drilling the four corners of the slot or mortice before starting to mill it square might help. I have some straight fluted tungsten carbide letter drills which drill very straight, and could start a twist drill doing the same.

I did think of making my own broach. A proper one, designed to convert a round hole to a square one, is a very large job and would surely require more force than the 10 ton press I can use. But a one-corner broach, to do one corner at a time and with three corners rounded off to match the milled hole, should be a lot easier on both counts.