Milling Machine Gun Uses

[John Allen]

I am thinking about getting a milling machine for specialty fittings we can no longer get for resale. What gun uses can I use a milling machine for? I know I can of course mill flats with it but what else? I am looking at more basic stuff. The machines I am looking at power feeds but are not cnc.

Thanks John

[fishhawk]

sight dove tails for one.

[danski26]

With a mill and a lathe any cut can be made. With one or the other about 60% of cuts can be made. A mill can cut flats, keys, channels, holes, dovetails, angles, checkering, lines, and anything else your tooling and imagination can come up with.

[country gent]

A milling machine will do alot with the right tooling and skill set. Holes on location. fixtures and tooling, shapes. fluting.Shoulders and stops. Cam surfaces. A milling machine is very versatle and usefull. With the right tooling a end mill can do alot. A lathe and mill and anything canbe made. I have made scope rails and mounts on a bridgeport mill. An indexer and rotary table are needed tooling. A good vise. A set of strap clamps. A boring head is really nice to have. a good digital read out on x and y axis makes life alot easier.

[W.R.Buchanan]

A Bridgeport Mill is the best drill press there is. You can locate holes precisely and with the right vise you can hold virtually anything.

I'm sure you can use those features in your gunsmithing endeavors.

Randy

[nhrifle]

I've done a few AR lower receivers on my little X2 benchtop mill. The only limits are the ones you place upon yourself.

[elk hunter]

You can make just about any part you want with the exception of things like turning or threading a barrel. Here's a picture of machining a mono-block/breech to hold the barrels of a double rifle using my Bridgeport clone.

[seagiant]

Hi,
Well they can haul my BP out right after I go to the bone-yard! It took me literally years to find it but it was worth the search! What can you do with it??? Just about everything! Forget about doing real gunsmithing jobs that will actually save you hundreds of dollars without one. I only paid $2000 for mine and know I've already paid it off on just dong my own sight installs for my own guns!

My BP has no X,Y,Z power feeds or a DRO setup but it is still in good shape and does everything I ask of it! I do hope to get a DRO eventually and some more tooling but that has not stopped me from doing quite a bit of work!

[waksupi]

I'll throw in a gunsmithing tip. If cutting a dovetail, make clearance cuts with a straight mill bit. Then use the angle dovetailing bit to cut the dovetail a few thousands at a time. Those bits break easy, and you don't want to try to hog out the whole dovetail with them.

[scb]

Case trimmer. I bought a Hollywood Sr. press specifically to mount on my Bridgeport. I make a lot of wildcat casings that require cutting a lot of brass off. I mount a file trim die in the press. Center the spindle over the trim die. Set the quill stop a thousandth of an inch or so above the die. I use a .625 4 flute carbide mill. Run the case into the trim die. Bring the quill down, bring it back up and I can have a perfect 300 AAC case in a matter of seconds.

[seagiant]

Case trimmer. I bought a Hollywood Sr. press specifically to mount on my Bridgeport. I make a lot of wildcat casings that require cutting a lot of brass off. I mount a file trim die in the press. Center the spindle over the trim die. Set the quill stop a thousandth of an inch or so above the die. I use a .625 4 flute carbide mill. Run the case into the trim die. Bring the quill down, bring it back up and I can have a perfect 300 AAC case in a matter of seconds.

Hi,
Never thought of that!!!

Here ya go Waksupi! Putting Novaks on a FEG Hi Power clone!

[Green Frog]

Milling flats for octagon barrels, making some small parts, making special shell holders for odd cartridges, cutting extractor slots, making many shooting accessories, engine turning parts, etc, etc. The only limits if you have a good lathe and mill are your skill and imagination.

Froggie

[leftiye]

I'll throw in a gunsmithing tip. If cutting a dovetail, make clearance cuts with a straight mill bit. Then use the angle dovetailing bit to cut the dovetail a few thousands at a time. Those bits break easy, and you don't want to try to hog out the whole dovetail with them.

Feed slowly grasshopper.:kidding:

[DCM]

Barrel fluting + what others have said.

[John Allen]

Thanks Guys, I am going to get one this winter if the finances are there.

[seagiant]

John,
Do yourself a BIG favor and try to find a real Bridgeport! They are out there as even the smaller machine shops have gone to CNC types to be competitive! The Bridgeport Series I is actually considered "small" in commercial terms but no doubt the best all around MANUAL milling machine ever produced!

I put an ad over at Practical Machinist site and actually got a tip from a guy in Kentucky that knew about one 30 miles from my house (in Florida) as he did business with the machine shop owner and knew it was for sale! I picked it up for $2000 which is what you will pay for a decent Chi-Com Mill Drill anyway and the BP is light years better! Just saying!

http://www.lathes.co.uk/bridgeport/

[alrighty]

A Bridgeport is great to have around and you will find many uses for it.Mine is an older J2 head but it is a series one, step pulley and only 1 h.p. I find it is all I need for around the house and being a step pulley is very quiet.It came from the auction after the plant I was working closed down , a silver lining if you will.

[John Taylor]

You can even turn a ball with a mill and an indexer.
http://i95.photobucket.com/albums/l132/johnptaylor/ballturning.jpg

[MBTcustom]

Strap your barrel vice to it. It's aweful hard to move 3700 pounds.
78935
Make custom pieces to get you out of a pinch.
Low profile safety:
78936
Use it to mill the weld off the bolt handle you just welded up. Get's you that nice square shoulder.
78938
Use it to jewel your bolt's
78944

[John Allen]

ok fellas, what about this one.

http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/tls/3990147050.html

I do have three phase so that would be ok.

[MBTcustom]

Looks pretty good I suppose, but you may end up spending that much again on tool holders. Them 30's ain't cheap ya know.
Other than that it looks pretty good if you have 3 phase, and enough room in your shop to house it. Generally speaking, I would be looking for something a little smaller for doing gunsmith work, but there's not a reason in the world you couldn't make that work.

[John Allen]

goodsteel, thanks that is the kind of advice I need. I have some feelers out and am not in a hurry.

[Bent Ramrod]

If you get that one, you can half- and full-octagon barrels easily with the horizontal feature (and an index head) as well as doing all the stuff the vertical machine can do. You can do octagon barrels using a vertical mill but the setup (for me at least) has always been a little trickier.

All it takes is money and space.

[MBTcustom]

Good call Ramrod!
I didn't see that little vertical spindle hiding back there in plain sight LOL!
Very observant!

[W.R.Buchanan]

John Taylor. You are the second person that I have ever seen make a knob like that.

I made two delrin knobs that were used as mast bearings on the only two Nacra 36' catamarans that were built. Yes there were only two made and they were fast! Just like big Hobie Cats . These boats would do nearly 40 mph in a 20 mph wind!

The knobs were used as the bearing on the bottom of the mast so the mast could rotate freely and act as part of the airfoil that the sail formed .

A buddy suggested doing it that way and I just used a whirly gig spindex fixture since the ball was made from Delrin and cut easily. They were 3" in Dia.

It worked great and produced a perfect ball

Randy

[akajun]

Other good brands to look for which are still in business and can easily get parts for are a Lagun (spain) and Wells Index. BTW these machines are larger and more stout than the comparable bridgeport models. My ft1 is about 500lbs heavier than a bp.

[John Taylor]

ok fellas, what about this one.

http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/tls/3990147050.html

I do have three phase so that would be ok.

Nice looking machine. You can do fluting and octagon with the horizontal.

[Whiterabbit]

I find myself using the lathe for 4 out of 5 jobs. At the moment, I really just use the mill for finely locating holes to drill.

It probably goes back to what these fine folks say about being limited by tooling, imagination, and most important, skill.

But I don't know where I'd be without a lathe right now. If I could only have one, it would be the lathe...

[seagiant]

Hi,
The lathe is queen of the workshop! I always saw it as Lathe for round stock and Mill for square! Go figure!

[Whiterabbit]

You say queen, not king. Is that because the lathe has MORE power in the shop than the mill?






























http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/images/smilies/hide.gif

[W.R.Buchanan]

Sorry guys,,, The Mill is king of the shop. A Bridgeport type milling machine is 10 times more versatile than a lathe.

A mill can do two things It can bore a hole and it can remove metal using a cutter. Obviously it can do other things as well but they are all variations of the first two.

A lathe can only do one thing. remove material using a cutter. Boring a hole on a lathe is the exact opposite of turning the outside.

The big difference is in all the variations you can do with the mill. Plus you can do virtually everything on a mill that you can do on a lathe.

Obviously for certain types of jobs one machine works better than the other.

That's why you need both.

Seagiants analogy of saying a lathe is for round stuff and a mill is for square stuff is exactly how I explain these machines to lay people. Then I show them sample parts made with each so they get the picture.

Randy.

[mroliver77]

With the proper setup you can bore cylinders, line bore bearing holes, drill holes in any shaped part that is within tolerance of the machine, do light milling and much more on a lathe.
J

[W.R.Buchanan]

With the proper setup you can bore cylinders, line bore bearing holes, drill holes in any shaped part that is within tolerance of the machine, do light milling and much more on a lathe.
J

You can also do all of those things alot easier on a mill, and a whole lot more.

Doing anything more than basic turning and boring operations on a lathe gets into very specialized tooling and setups that are time consuming and are generally very limited in usage.

If you put a milling attachment onto a lathe you now have a limited capacity "Horizontal Boring Mill."

Randy

[MBTcustom]

For 99% of jobs in a manufacturing setting, the mill is king.
However, for gunsmithing, the mill can be dispensed with and replaced with a drill press and a good set of files, but the lathe is absolutely indispensable.

At the end of the day, whoever has the nicest toys, and knows how to use them gets to make the nice stuff. If you cut too many corners in your shop, then it will show in the things you make, and in that regaurd, a true gunsmith needs a few pieces of heavy machinery. They are:
1. A milling machine. The biggest, most powerful and most accurate you can afford.
2. A lathe. The biggest, most powerful and most accurate you can afford.
3.A surface grinder. The most accurate you can afford.
4. Tools and wheels for the previous three. The best quality you can afford.

All the competition has these three tools and accessories, and that brings the expectation of a certain level of quality that must be met in order to make people happy with your work.
I bought my lathe first, and quickly found that I needed a mill if I was going to get anywhere in this business. At this point there is simply no room for a surface grinder, but I expect to move into a bigger shop in the next five years, and that will be on my short list of stuff I gotta have, along with a TIG welder.
However, getting the tools is only 20% of the battle in my mind. Learning to use all these things and being able to switch between them effortlessly is a much harder indeavor.
Also, you have to be able to come up with fixturing, and ways to do things on the fly without spending three days figuring out how to get there from here.
For instance, yesterday, I was needing to open up the face of a Mouser bolt for a magnum cartridge, and the barrel was still lined up in the lathe. Hmmm, well, looks like I have to use the milling machine to open the bolt face instead of the lathe. So, how do you hold a Mauser bolt straight up and down rigidly enough to bore the hardened face out? You gotta think outside the box.
I grabbed my barrel vice, and used it to hold my precision grinding vice sideways, and I held the bolt with the grinding vice. Worked like a charm.
BTW, there is an adjustable parallel under the rear of the vice, and a 1 1/2" parallel laying flat under the vice to get the height required.
79529
79530
79532

[oldred]

If I could have only one machine it would be the lathe, while it is certainly true that set-up and specialized tooling requirements make milling type operations cumbersome and very time consuming they are still possible if that's the only machine available. I guess what I'm saying is that's possible to use a lathe for milling operations but it's not nearly as practical to use a mill for most lathe operations. When I did my scratch built 45-90 High Wall project my 14x40 lathe was all I had in my shop so I first built a milling attachment and a few other specialized tools and then milled the receiver from a 1 1/2"x3"x7" piece of 4140HT, every single part of the rifle was milled on that lathe except for the rear sights (Marbles) and the brass butt plate which I stole from my muzzle loader. Was it time consuming? You bet it was and set-up was a real PITA but the fact is it worked! Even the barrel was milled on the lathe using an attachment I made just for the purpose of milling that Green Mountain 1.27" round barrel blank into a heavy octagon but I will be the first to admit that in a money making situation this setup would be a disaster.

[MBTcustom]

If I could have only one machine it would be the lathe, while it is certainly true that set-up and specialized tooling requirements make milling type operations cumbersome and very time consuming they are still possible if that's the only machine available. I guess what I'm saying is that's possible to use a lathe for milling operations but it's not nearly as practical to use a mill for most lathe operations. When I did my scratch built 45-90 High Wall project my 14x40 lathe was all I had in my shop so I first built a milling attachment and a few other specialized tools and then milled the receiver from a 1 1/2"x3"x7" piece of 4140HT, every single part of the rifle was milled on that lathe except for the rear sights (Marbles) and the brass butt plate which I stole from my muzzle loader. Was it time consuming? You bet it was and set-up was a real PITA but the fact is it worked! Even the barrel was milled on the lathe using an attachment I made just for the purpose of milling that Green Mountain 2.17" round barrel blank into a heavy octagon but I will be the first to admit that in a money making situation this setup would be a disaster.

That pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject exactly. Although, I'm to darn lazy to go making a milling setup for the lathe, so I went and spent 2K on a milling machine, and dang near killed myself getting it into the shop. LOL!
Seriously, that weekend was a flurry of activity what with running electricity, lights, etc etc. I remember running to Lowes to get more wire and things, and I literally almost passed out in the hardware aisle. But I didn't have to convert my lathe into a Mill LOL!
Kudos on that oldred. Making something work that wasn't designed for it may be impractical from a manufacturing standpoint but it does make you one resourceful feller.

[W.R.Buchanan]

I have seen some amazing things done on a lathe. One guy I know made and entire Telescope out of aluminum with a zillion drilled and tapped holes that he located and drilled and tapped on that Atlas lathe.

What you run into is how much time do you want to spend setting up to do each one of those operations. If you have no other way that is fine, then time doesn't matter. However if it does matter then it can be quantified in $ per hour. And if you spend enough of those dollars sooner or later you would have been able to pay for the correct machine for the job.

Combination machines are the attempted solution to this problem. They always have to make compromises so that they will do more jobs. However they rarely do anything well, and that is why no name brand tool company has ever made one.

Having a shop is all about having a place to put the tools that you need to perform the work you want to do. I started in a small one car garage. I worked up to what I have now. I have 2 mills, three lathes, a drill press (which I use just about every day to chamfer holes I drilled on the mills.) a TIG and MIG welder, several grinders and buffers, and a bunch of stuff to make all this other stuff make money. It took me the better part of 30 years to amass all of this stuff, and when I stop doing it for money (Fat chance!) I will use my tools to make stuff for my own use and possibly things that will outlast me by many years. (see my Jeep Project) That's kind of why I went down this road in the first place,, so I could bring my ideas into the real world to test them against what is already here.

Life for me is a competition..

Being a craftsman is all about, "not only doing the best you can," but also "doing work that places you as high in the available workforce as possible." You have to compete for work and the better you are, the more work you'll get.

Obviously that comes down to doing the best you can every time you step up to the plate. Tying your hands with inferior equipment is not the way to accomplish this and expect to get paid for it. Nobody cares if you can "do a job" with a certain piece of equipment. They only care if you can do the job correctly, and they can afford it.

It is one thing to do work in a hobby environment, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The payback is the satisfaction of creating something.

It is entirely a different thing to do it for a living. In that arena you must give yourself every advantage possible to insure your success. Your livelihood depends on it.

Another installment of my .02!

Randy

[MBTcustom]

Randy, that post is absolutely 100% solid diamond studded gold. Couldn't have said it better, shorter, or sweeter if I had a week to think about it.

[oldred]

What you run into is how much time do you want to spend setting up to do each one of those operations. If you have no other way that is fine, then time doesn't matter. However if it does matter then it can be quantified in $ per hour.

[And if you spend enough of those dollars sooner or later you would have been able to pay for the correct machine for the job.]Randy

I hope you don't mind me making a bit of a correction here, that should be "sooner RATHER THAN later" instead of " sooner OR later!" :smile:


I couldn't agree more and what I was talking about was only having the choice of one machine or the other which due to financial or space constraints is often the case. In my case the lathe was for farm machinery use for myself and my neighbors and the rifle was just a hobby project, I guess it's a case of one thing leading to another and what was to be a one off project has turned into a whole new hobby! My small shop started as a work shed on my farm out in the boonies "back on the ridge" here in Tn and I barely had room for the lathe so building the rifle had to be done using only it and hand tools, I have a rather extensive collection of well cared for files which saw a lot of use on this project so obviously any type of production work was hopeless. Production or work for profit was of no concern but if it was it would have been, as I said earlier, a disaster considering the time involved.


I recently purchased a mill! It's a Taiwanese built Bridgeport clone in very good condition and came with a lot of goodies such as a like new Kurt vise, clamping hardware, a large set of R8 collets, etc and I'm just getting everything set up as of now. I got a good chuckle out of Goodsteels comments on going to Lowes for wire and connection hardware since I had just done exactly the same thing at Lowes only two days before! I can also relate to the sticker shock he mentioned because I had not bought any wire or wiring supplies in a few years and the price increase was staggering. Once I started using the lathe it just kind of "snowballed" from there and my needs have quickly outgrown what I thought I would be doing when I first bought the lathe, a couple of years ago I was sure the lathe alone would meet needs but- well you know how it is!

[KCSO]

I have bits ground for use in wood and use the milling machine to rough out all my stock inlets for muzzleloaders too. Just keep it clean and don't leave ANY wood on the mill.

[John Allen]

Goodsteel and the rest of you milling machine owners. How does this one look http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/tls/4011228640.html I am still looking but this one is close to me and a bridgeport. Is there anything I should chekc when I go look at it? Thanks John

[MBTcustom]

Take a good, sharp 1/2" and 3/8" endmills with you and a piece of aluminum stock. Make some heavy, and light side cuts with them (especially the 1/2") that will tell you if the head needs rebuilt.

Look real closely at the scraper marks in the ways.
For me, it's a deal breaker if those scraper marks are getting thin, or have been worn out completely. You can fix anything in the head, but if the ways are gone your screwed.

[Ed K]

I have bits ground for use in wood and use the milling machine to rough out all my stock inlets for muzzleloaders too. Just keep it clean and don't leave ANY wood on the mill.

Is wood particularly bad... moisture, acidity, etc.?

[seagiant]

Take a good, sharp 1/2" and 3/8" endmills with you and a piece of aluminum stock. Make some heavy, and light side cuts with them (especially the 1/2") that will tell you if the head needs rebuilt.

Look real closely at the scraper marks in the ways.
For me, it's a deal breaker if those scraper marks are getting thin, or have been worn out completely. You can fix anything in the head, but if the ways are gone your screwed.

Hi,
Good advice! Though being a novice you may not have the experience to take advantage of it! Precision machinery is scrapped to get the ways completly flat,then as a finishing touch it is FLAKED,which is actually a series of divits to help hold oil and assist in two flat surfaces sliding on each other! The wear on the flaking is used as an indicator of the wear on the machine ways.

I am not home to take some pics but maybe someone can show you a good used but still servicable machine ways for a home shop. I paid $2000 for my BP and it actually has some wear on it (1965) but for a homeshop machinist will be fine and does everything I need! A Hobbyist would take 30 years to put as much wear on a machine as one used everyday in a commercial shop in 3 years! This is of course IMO!

[MBTcustom]

Is wood particularly bad... moisture, acidity, etc.?

Wood is particularly bad in two ways. First, wood dust sucks up a lot if the oil that your mill and lathe use to keep from eating themsves alive, and second, wood had cilica in it, and is pretty abrasive in its own right.
If you need to cut wood on your machinery, oil the heck out of it ahead of time, and then wipe the ways clean as soon as you are done.

[Jeff Michel]

You should bring a dial indicator and a magnetic base with you with you to verify that the spindle don't have any runout. Check out the back lash on your x and y axis. If you're not sure how, turn your graduated handwheel until it reads zero, go 1 revolution to be sure. Then, turn the wheel in the opposite direction until the table starts to move. That slack prior to engagement is back lash. Anything from 15 to 20 thousands isn't unreasonable with a used machine. It pretty unlikely that machine is hooked up to run. If it is, have them run it in the lowest back gear and the highest speed. You're listening to the bearings. You won't have to listen long if their crappy. I wouldn't sweat wear on the ways too much, just look for what would be real obvious wear, and the wear would also indicate misalignment of the table ways with the saddle. A good steel ruler, about 6 inches long will serve as a straight edge, 12 inches would better but you probably won't have enough room on a mill that small. Lay your rule on the ways (on edge) and look for light between the ways and the ruler edge. Check a couple spots to verify if your paranoid about such things. FWIW, based on the picture. I wouldn't worry too much. Most of these machines come out of an industrial environment, they are dirty/nasty and probably have enough wear to make PRODUCTION work to spec, slow. That doesn't mean that with care you can't product good parts. Remember all new machines are produced on used machines. It's akin to turning a horse out in retirement, a little light work every now and then and it will last you forever. The price is decent, since it has a vise. The older step pulleys models are getting dumped forcing the price down a bit. The good thing is, Bridgeport parts are available should you need any.

[W.R.Buchanan]

I have to interject here. if you are serious about a Bridgeport type mill I suggest you actually get a Bridgeport mill. Sure there are clones that are available and some are actually decent machines. However finding parts for off brands gets to be a problem.

Bridgeports use all the good stuff. IE Grade 7 Spindle bearings, and name brand hardware. My older Mill which I rebuilt in 1992 has had the spindle bearings removed, dropped balls all over the floor, cleaned, reassembled and has ran for 20+ years in my shop with about .0001 runout! IE: they are good bearings and just cleaning them and adjusting the preload makes more difference than replacing them at $3-400 per set.

Bridgeport machines also have a certain feel. This maybe hard to understand however it does exist. They just feel better when you are cranking on the handles and pulling on the knobs. Some here will understand what I am saying. Chinese machines do not feel this way.

There are other good brands of machine tools. I have ran most all of them at one time or another.

The ones that are closest to Bridgeport's are Supermax's, and they are Taiwanese clones, but they are well made. There is a big difference between Taiwanese and Chinese, and that difference is 30 years of making machines. None of the other Chinese imports even come close. They are made to sell cheap, and whereas they will do a job, they wear out quickly . The average life of a Clone mill in a normal shop is 2-5 years. The normal life of a Bridgeport in the same shop is 25 years.

There are other Turret Mills out there. However when you start talking about Lagun's and mills like them (Lagun Clones like Webb's) you are now talking 3300 lb machines as opposed to Bridgeport's type machines at 2300 lbs.

There are also Tree mills. These are considered by many to be the best there ever was. Tree mills have the best table and way system ever built, they are down right beautiful. However the head on Tree mills is the biggest sucko *** that was ever devised. It is just plain a PITA to operate, uses it's own collets, has a flywheel that weighs 50 lbs, and doesn't reverse quickly so you can't tap with it. They suck, just take my word for it. A common solution is to adapt a Bridgeport head to a Tree Mill. Then you have a pretty neat machine,,, that weighs 3500 lbs.

A used up BP can be rebuilt. Having the ways reground is not that expensive, about $300 for the table, saddle and knee. Some outfits can actually regrind the column ways, but they seldom need it . My old mill got the full treatment and it cost $500 to do the whole machine. It takes a special grinding machine to do the column ways. Patford Grinding in Santa Fe Springs CA has one. They can grind lathe bed ways to 25' long!

Surprisingly just taking the machine apart cleaning everything and reassembling and readjusting all of the gibs will make 90% of the machines out there work pretty well. I have done about 12 in my life and they all came out great with few parts replaced. Also All parts for BP's are available from many sources, and will be for a long time.

My old mill was made in 1956 and was the first year for the Vee Ram (as opposed to the round ram) It still used the column from the earlier round ram mills the difference being the turret itself. The original invoice was in the side tooling cabinet held to the wall with magnets.

My machine was so bad that the table had a .008 bow ground into in it which meant you couldn't cut a strait line with it. The table and all ways were reground. I filled and repainted the castings, installed a new Z Axis screw, and Trav-a-dials on the X&Y axis'. I also built a DC drive for the machine that allows me to run it on 110AC right out of the wall. This unit has limit switches that can be attached to the quill and the machine will automatically reverse when they are activated. I use this function for tapping holes when I have a lot to do. A recent job required 1800 tapped holes. This machine killed that job.

My whole point of this long post is to inform you that in this case, second hand is better than second rate. Finding and old BP and restoring it will give you a machine that will serve you for a long time, and actually be worth something when you decide to sell it. My 1956 BP cost me $2000 in 1986 and I spent another $1000 rebuilding it a few years later.. I have used it for 20+ years and I could sell it for $4500 in a heartbeat.

Sure there are other brands out there that will do the job. But they are pretty much all copies of the BP. Copies are never as good as originals.

I could go on and on. Those that know, will agree 100% with me on this point.

Randy

[oldred]

Lots of truth to statement that the old bridgeports just feel different, in my buddy's shop he has an older "Exacto" (Taiwanese) BP clone and a much newer "Jet" that while somewhat different is actually close enough to be called a clone. That old J-head Bridgy is a real jewel! The other machines are smooth enough when operated manually but that feel that "may be hard to understand" I think is related to consistency more than anything else. When turning those handwheels the imports will have subtle loose/tight spots, nothing major but there anyway, while the BP is consistent throughout it's range. After "playing" with all those machines I honestly would without hesitation take that old, but well cared for, Bridgeport over even the almost brand new Jet!