For my next mill project I will need to use a slotting saw. The blades were bought on Ebay a few months ago, but I still needed an arbor so I made one today. And here it is completed.
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For my next mill project I will need to use a slotting saw. The blades were bought on Ebay a few months ago, but I still needed an arbor so I made one today. And here it is completed.
I recently finished installing an X power feed on the G0678 mill and I took a bunch of pictures. This power feed came from Enco when they had their latest sale. It's marked made in Taiwan, seems nicely made and was $225 shipped which is a pretty good deal (Those were the days!). Here's the stock hand wheel and dial arrangement on the G0678 mill. This mill is a bit different then it's other 6x26 cousins in that the dial rests on the hand wheel.
Found some more pictures of some work I did last week on levelling the mill. It turns out the threaded holes in the bottom of the casting are 1/2-13 which makes finding levelling hardware easy. After chasing the holes with a tap to clean them out and making sure they were well oiled it was time for the levellers. I bought this set at Amazon, but McMaster's and other sources have the same thing.
Well, I have been sitting on these pictures long enough so here's a post about my new mill, a Grizzly G0678. It's a 8x30, variable-speed knee mill. A little background. I've been shopping for a mill since the day after I bought a 1974 South Bend 10K lathe. I couldn't handle a Bridgeport-size mill in my tiny shop, but wanted something a bit bigger than the G0704 that popped-up on CL 5 miles down the road.
I would like to thank Mr Frazier for posting this project in a forum as I found this bit of lathe tooling to be very helpful and quite a time/frustration saver. I don't have a mill yet, so drilling accurately through a bar can take quite a bit of time to set up on the drill press, but with this tool it's so much easier as you start already on center and perpendicular to the work.
I made an extended center drill holder A center drill holder is a common enough project, usually using a scrapped taper drill bit or drill chuck adapter. The trouble with these is that my SB 10K only has 2" of quill travel and the typical holder just isn't long enough. So I read somewhere about an extended version and thought it would be a fun afternoon project. The project started with a $5 JT33 to Morse Taper 2 Drill Chuck Arbor.
When I was lathe shopping last year, I had a list of features I wanted in a lathe: cross feed, tumbler reverse, QCGB and the option of cutting metric threads with change gears. The SB 10K I ended-up purchasing met all those needs well (and I really like it) but I was left scrounging around for the metric gears. South Bend manufactured a set specifically for these lathes (the 9A & 10K) back in the day but they are hard to find.
Having reverse available on a lathe can be quite handy, but getting it working on a 120V split-phase motor with a drum switch can be tough. Here's how to get reverse working with the motor described below. Here's the motor: http://www.grainger.com/product/DAYTON-GP-Mtr-4K913?s_pp=false&= And a pic of the label: First off, a safety notice. While this circuit isn't unsafe, it's not as safe as it could be because the neutral-line is not switched: it's always connected between the motor and the outlet with a wire nut.
I've had my South Bend 10K since this spring and was lucky enough to purchase a lathe that was in pretty good shape. While a large overhaul isn't necessary, I felt it was time to start on some preventative maintenance. Since the lathe doesn't need new paint (although it would look nice), I'm just going to do small repairs on the lathe between projects. The first and most import job on the repair list is pulling the spindle and replacing the spindle oil wicks.
When I bought my SB 10K earlier this year, the 6" 4-Jaw chuck that was included in the deal had a backplate that was for a different lathe. The chuck was a bit rusty and dinged-up, but still seemed to be solid and tight. The goal of this project was to make the chuck usable for this lathe. Here's the Logan 6" 4 jaw chuck disassembled. A threaded lathe backplate was purchased from tools4cheap.