Thread: Turcite on steel ways. Scraping question

Originally Posted by Anorak Bob

Pete and Bruce,

I have thought about making a riser a number of times, even got to the point of doing a rough sketch. My idea was a welded box frame with a cast iron dovetail extension, keyed and screw fixed to the former. One problem would be the machining, post welding, of the riser. The rough external dimensions are 240 x 255. Larger than the capacity of my shaper and either mill. Easy on the larger mill that the three of us don't have. Outside help would be required. The cast iron could simply be sawn from a larger round slice.

If you did forge ahead with a riser would you machine a new longer Z traverse screw or limit the riser height to that of full extension of the screw?

I also have a selection of 3 Morse collets augmenting my scant collection of 3C collets for when those precious millimetres count.

Back around the time that I acquired my other mill, there was a nice Cincinnati Contour Master for sale over here for a bit over 3 large. Maybe a touch larger than a Bridgeport. It appeared to be in good condition. The table was blemish free. Harnessed to the thing was a hydraulic tracing attachment which could have been removed. I often called into seller's, Bill's Machinery and deliberated.

The Schaublin took 3 days to haul off the trailer and into position. The Cincinnati would have required a crane and use of the neighbour's driveway. Then it would have required stripping and repainting. Someone had covered the original grey with beige. A bigger shed and no carport in the way and I might have bought it. I just don't have enough room.


BT

Bob & Pete
I have come to the conclusion that as a man gets older, he needs a bigger shed & a smaller house.
The bigger shed being filled with more & bigger machines & ongoing supplies of more & more tools.
My wife cannot understand me.
Please help
regards
Bruce
ps after reading about Petes inspirational project this morning I spent most of the day machining up yet another milling gadget for my Hercus 260 lathe.Determined never to give up ! I would like to make a riser for the mill, but keep putting it off.
Pictures will soon follow

Thanks Bob, I'll keep that in mind, but reckon it's normally a heck of a lot easier to raise the work higher than the table can go, than to lower the table lower than the table can go

Bruce I don't know how inspirational it is, mainly just kicking stones around while looking at it at the moment! When you finally get over here you'll see how weeny my workshop is ... and I still reckon I can get at least one more mill in there!

Yes pictures please.

Pete

Originally Posted by Pete F

Bob, the reason I posted the question about turcite or similar is because I'd read that it was relatively soft. It got me thinking that it may be able to be trimmed down to roughly the correct dimensions using other means than the machining we normally consider here. I've also heard it to be very fast to scrape for the same reason. However even I needed to farm it out to another mill, I can't imagine it would be outrageously expensive. It would be scraped in after machining anyway.

I would leave the standard screw and sacrifice the ability to wind all the way to the very top. I'm thinking of only a 150-200 mm riser so don't see that as being a huge sacrifice.

Pete

I made a pattern for a CI slideway over 10 years ago. 200mm wide and 50mm thick IIRC, with screw tunnel in the middle, total 600mm long. The plan was to bolt it to some parallel flange channel or another casting, avoided making split patterns and re-used the same slideway casting in a couple different places.

Be easy to get some cast up if anyone really wanted one. You could cut 3 or 4 extension pieces out of 1 casting.

The screw tunnel might be a bit wide for a Hercus, not sure as I made it big to pass a ball screw. One of those projects sitting on the 'to do' list.

Camera is broken or I'd post a picture. Let me know if there's any interest & I'll take the pattern down to the foundry.

PDW

Edit: camera miraculously recovered & I hauled the casting out of its box. It's sides are 65mm thick after machining & the web between the slideways is 15mm thick so I probably used 20mm ply or close to that.

Pix attached.

Thanks Peter, but I think the pattern would be a bit of an overkill in this situation. If you look at the link in the first post you can see it literally is just a dovetail involved. Since it's only short, if it needed to be CI it could just be machined out of a disk as mentioned by Bob.

Once I have the new lathe properly installed I may go back and have a better look at this mill and just how much work I want to put into it. I'm also quite keen to cast a new bronze nut for it. The old one isn't too bad, but another good "exercise"

Pete