The weather has been nice enough (for August) so I have spent a lot of time in the shop crossing things off my list. The controller in my 7x12 finally gave it up so I pulled my extra out of the cabinet and solved that little issue. The old board was for a 250 watt motor, the spare was actually for my x2...a 350 watt board. With the extra breathing room I was able to tweak a bit more torque out of the lathe. It parts off like nobody's business now!
With my homemade power feed unit FINALLY up and running on the mill it seemed like a good time to do a little (okay...a lot) of tweaking on that side of the bench. I pulled out the new z axis rack gear I bought about 6 months ago and started cleaning the dragon grease off of it. Aerosol brake cleaner works really well by the way. I retapped the metric holes in the column for 1/4-20 as I have a box of nice stainless 1/4-20 CS screws and I like to eliminate the metric stuff any chance I get.
Got the rack installed, and while I had the mill apart I did some shimming and proper tramming to get everything running straight.
Then I pulled a chunk of ali-bronze out of the rack and made up a new set of table gibs for the mill. The old Chinese iron ones had been tweaked and fiddled with all I cared to and they still wouldn't move as freely as I wanted. The x and y move like butter now with the new gibs in! If you haven't replaced your's yet I highly recommend it! It made the same difference in feel on the mill that tapered gibs made on my lathe. Fignoggle has a drawing for a gib fixture you can get that makes machining them up a breeze.
Since I made the rear toolpost for my lathe I no longer have the rigidity issues when parting that I had before, so I decided to put the compound back on and get it tuned up. It will be better tomorrow when I make a new gib for it (and for the cross-slide as well) but for now it is at least back where it belongs. I made a block out of aluminum that fits underneath and straddles the compound screw so I can crank the compound down against something solid when I'm not using it. Now I think I'll use that piece of 12L14 I have been hoarding and build a QCTP. With the extra torque I notice that I have better luck with carbide now so I might as well put it to good use.
Lots left to do but the shop is improving every day. I have a dr's appointment in the city in a couple of weeks...while I'm there I think I'll hit the scrap yards and see if I can't put the rear suspension to the test.
