[mjarus]

Well my son and I got our new mill up and running. But... I got a few questions.

1) When were cleaning it up we went to remove the X table by removing the nuts on the left and turning it all the way to the right. When the leadscrew disenganged the table refused to moved in either direction! We had to finally remove the lead screw by removing the right hand side of the table and tap it slightly with a rubber mallet back to the left. It finally loosed up and we removed it from the left. Has anyone else had this happen?! After clean-up everything now seems fine and we can even remove it normally now, but what would casue it to bind like that, swarf?

2) When the engine runs at the higher rpm it is pretty darn loud... you can hear some gear chatter or something too. Is this normal?

All in all it seems like a pretty good deal. X backlash was only .0035 and y was .0025. The z just sucks in fine tuning. I even had a situation where it "slipped" after I put it into position with the fine tuning screw. Is that normal?

We made 2 test cuts into some aluminum at about 1/16" with a spindle speed of about 1500 rpms. Seemed to cut pretty smooth.

Thanks for any response to the above 2 questions. By the way it is a HF model. Got it on sale in the store for $449. Looks to be worth the money...

mjarus.

[JFettig]

To get the table off, you will wnat to loosen the gibs, the little nuts and allen set screws in front of the table on the saddle, to remove the saddle you will also want to loosen those on the right side of it and take off the y-axis leadscrew and slide the saddle off.

The motor is relatively loud, the gear chatter is semi-normal but if you loosen up the black plate and turn on the motor slowly and adjust it by hand so it makes the least chatter you can get rid of some of that. Your backlash is minimal and sounds good.

As for the fine tuning, I found that if you push up on the tri prong arm thing while doing all that untill the gib is locked(use the gib lock whenever cutting) it does a much better job.


Jon

[mjarus]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Thanks for the tip on push up on the large z-axis wheel, I will give that a shot. When it slipped I wanted to plunge into a piece of aluminum so I couldn't really put the Gib lock in place (or am I missing something).

Where is this black plate to remove for adjustment? What do I adjust? Sorry... first time with messing with one of these... Oh yeah, the spindle had about .003" of play in it when I turned it with the dial on it, is that good, bad or indifferent?

I did remove the nuts on the screws assuming that would loosen the gib... but I probably didn't back out the screws... even then why would it still come off to the left and not bind like it did to the right? You are probably right in your diagnosis, but it struck me as odd at the time.

Thanks for the answers!

mjarus.

[JFettig]

The gib lock is on the head, the back plate is the plate that the motor is mounted to.
That seems like a lot of runout for the spindle, did you measure the inside or outside of the spindle? Try measuring the inside.

Jon