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These milling machines are a model engineers dream,they are a real robust machine and yet are pretty versitile, you can buy one of these machines from an online auction or from a machine stockist and are still a pretty common machine, this machine has both vertical and horizontal facilities, although I use the vertical mostly I would be lost without the horizontal facility.
heres some piccies of the machine working
I take my hat of to mr Tom Senior, he produced a machine that has stood the test of time and abuse yet this particular machine is showing its age and can still turn out very accurate work to within 2-3 tens of a thousands of an inch.
this is where i started on the harrison fixed steady, a piece of 12mm m/steel plate, cut out to a basic shape, and then onto the lathe for trueing up, once roughed out and trued the job whent onto the rotary table and 4 slots were milled to take the steady posts. i will make the posts out of 20mm x 10mm x 80mm m/s flat bar and add a bronze tip to them to protect the work piece.
set up as the vertical miller, showing the steady on the rotary table 4 slots milled at 90 degrees
the machine light was recovered from a rubbish skip, although fully working i aim to give it a tidy up.
homemade flycutter,
the dimensions are 100mm x 10mm for the tool carrier and a mt2 shank welded to it, the tool is a spare r/handed cutting tool and bolted to the carrier by 3 M6 hex head bolts, this produces a lovelly finish at slow speed and plenty of coolant.
note the groove milled into the vice jaws, this makes the vice a lot more versitile, to make sure the vice was milled true on both jaws a piece of hardwood timber was placed in between the front jaw and the sliding jaw carrier (below the actual rear jaw) and tightened, this takes up any lift due to the jaws being under pressure, also dont forget to tighten the ways a little too.
milling the 60 degree dove tails into a piece of mild steel which will become the top slide unit for the tool and cutter grinder , the M1 has its own coolant system complete with pump and a large capacity fluid storage unit mounted into the base directly under the suds tray.
fitted to this M1 is a morse taper 3 spindle and has 1 inch diam mandrel tool holder,
i found that a fast spindle speed is the enemy when cutting in the horizontal possision, slow cutting speed, with light to medium feed speed on the gearbox, and the cutter flooded with coolant!
(i think i need to make up a shorter cutter mandrel)?
tom senior horizontal milling setup
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clamped to the table is a 1 1/2 inch thick piece of mild steel plate, i bought this piece of steel from a ship repair yard, it must have come off a battleship!! cut a piece off in 2 passes.
look at this video of the machine in action
i got these cutters off ebay the full set was approx £25, an abserlute bargain! but it was £23 for p/posting,ugh! not bad to say there is around 40 cutters though, included in the set was about 10 different sized slitting saws and several inverlute gear cutters, all cutters are 1" bore.
single cutters can be won on ebay for around £5.00 +
these are the hard disc's out of an old pc, they measure a perfect 0.050" i use these to raise the work up off the milling table when the job is clamped directly onto the table surface. i have a number of these disks and i like to double up on them just, to be on the safe side, as not to mark the table.
"BSO dividing head and tailstock"
im making a graduated dial for the tool and cutter grinder, this dial will control the movement for the leadscrew, the material used was a piece of 60mm diam aluminium, turned down first and then mounted in the dividing head and the work piece supported by the tailstock, i have not done much dividing, so a simple project to get used to the fundimentals, to divide 55mm diam into 360 divs with the "unit's" scale at a measured 2mm the "fives" scales at 5mm and the "tens" at 8mm long, a teadius job but the finished result is pretty good, just got to get some number stamps now and the job will be a good un!
the scribing tool was made from a broken 6mm drill bit, sharpened on the tool and cutter grinder to a very fine point and a bevel put on the front of the cutting edge to make a crisp fine line.
note the "table stoppers" i soon got into a quick routine for marking those little "unit's" lines, all 360 of them, the stoppers were obviously moved at the different scales.
the table adjusters were relaxed a little as i was only doing fine cuts.
the graduating dial now fitted it just needs the numbers stamping on!(when i get some), and the t&c grinder in its nearly finished state.
finally got round to milling some tee slots into the rotary table, heres some piccies of the progress,
i have not done any tee slotting before, and i got carried away! milled 2 slots then tee slotted them, agghh! i forgot to slot all 4 then tee slot. not to worry!
these cast steel blanks are fantastic to machine!
then the table is transfered onto the dividing head to mark the degree scale.
a handle will be fabricated to manually rotate the table, but its nearly finished and its looking good.
