The Home Machinist!

Last night I was browsing for reasonably good ER40 collets and found a 23 piece set of Accusize collets on Amazon for 50% off as a Black Friday sale. Harold said it was OK to post here as I have no affiliation. https://www.amazon.com/Accusize-Industrial-Tools-Collet-0223-0935/dp/B01A9F81OC/ref=sr_1_...

Congrats! It looks great.

Mark sent me a price list that covered regrinding the spindle. If the bearings are good it's $690.00 to regrind it from B&S #9 to R8. A new drawbar, if someone can't make one, is almost $153.00. For that kind of money I can learn to live with the Brown & Sharpe taper. I'll buy a decent BS9-E...

The great news is that the quill was not frozen. The lock just needed a little tap to disengage and the quill moved freely. There's a problem with the counterbalance spring that will need attention eventually. The spindle turns as well. I just put a wrench on the collet adapter and gave it a tug and...

You're probably right about the splines being rusted. That's an area that didn't get cutting oil spatters and is very dry. The spindle hand feed lever only moves a few degrees, like the tolerance of the mesh of the gear. The spindle hand feed wheel turns without doing anything so I'm assuming the ge...

Good point on the rust. There's not a lot of rust on the machine. I'm really surprised that the spindle and quill don't want to move considering that everything else moves easily. Maybe I overlooked a locking device. It has enough residual oil and cutting lube all over the machine that most of it mo...

Is this it? Sorry to sound so clueless. It's very different in some respects to the Bridgeports and clones that I've run in the past.

Fortunately the table is already down. The belt guard is sitting well off to the left. I need to mix some ATF and acetone. A couple of years ago I found out that not all ATF will mix with acetone. The newer formulae with synthetic components won’t mix but the older all mineral oil ATF blends easily....

Yes, I want to nod the head down but that's probably not an option at the moment. It's been used solely as a drill press for about 15 years so some of the head movements are pretty stiff if not frozen. I moved my Bridgeport clone as you described several times. Loaded it onto a truck by myself first...

Looks like I’m more like rust than golden. The shaft only moved outward less than 1/4” before hitting a hard stop. Now that I have a better idea of what to look for, there’s a supporting bearing just behind the bevel gear that’s shown in the drawing. The slide has to come off. Seeing that, the selle...

I'm heading to the seller's location shortly to see if I can pull the shaft. I found a rebuild that makes me think the shaft can be removed just by taking four screws out of a retainer. It's already exposed due to the end of the shaft and the dial already being separated from the rest of the machine...

I'm hoping the shaft is available at a reasonable/not too horrible cost or simple enough to make in house. I can't cut threads coarser than 8 TPI with my current lathe. That would probably be the only limitation and I doubt the shaft is even large enough for 8 TPI threads. A few months ago I looked ...