Some of you no doubt have followed by woes regarding my milling machine. Broken cutters, snapped drill bits etc, etc, not to mention poor machining results.
It was so bad I preferred to mill on the lathe as that gave me good results even if the scope of what could be done was somewhat limited with the tooling I have. No vertical slide and limited travel being the greatest limitations.
So when another small mill was being offered locally I decided to take the plunge. Besides, the price was not one that you could easily pass by even if a new miller wasn't wanted.
We spoke over the phone and a price was agreed. Eagerly I drove over to see it.
Oh what a disappointment. It looked in a terrible state and all rusted up. However, it operated really smoothly and upon closer inspection I began to realise the rust was not rust at all. Well, the top surface wasn't, so I took a chance and bought it.
That was yesterday, today I was hampered with plasterboarding walls and concreting the final part of my new garage footings.
But I really wanted to play with the new toy, well you would wouldn't you.
So, even though I was tired after today's workload, I decided to have a go at cleaning up the miller.
I was right, not only was it covered in rust coloured dried and very hard grease, it appeared to be the original shipping grease...
The last, first, owner had never cleaned it off. No wonder he didn't play with it much and lost interest as it wasn't even sliding properly on the bedways. But between hard, solid dried grease...!!
So after spending several hours with copious amounts of white spirit and enough kitchen towel to last several months I found this underneath all the grime. Oh the grime, the machine I bought was almost black all over.
Not bad eh?
A quick go at some machining and for the very first time I'm chuffed with the results.
This picture doesn't do it justice, the machine marks feel very smooth indeed.
I need to strip the castings and clean the bedways properly and it all seems a little slack now so the gibs need adjusting properly as well. Was all gummed up with grease before I guess. Also I managed to loose one of the pillar bolts during the move, so it's a little suspect on redigity in the pillar. A metric mill held together with imperial bolts it seems. Might be a job to find one locally not being metric, where does one find a 1/2" x 2" machine bolt these days?
As you can see, it's in very good condition all over.
