[Cowbell]

In my course of learning my way around the mill, I'm trying to figure out the proper way to use basic dial indicators. There are a few places on the web which hint at a tutorial, but they all leave out quite a few details.

First up - proper alignment of the dial indicator. Suppose you have the dial setup touching the end of your table, to measure x axis travel. Fine. But how do you ensure that the dial indicator itself is perfectly parallel to the motion of the milling table? There's no tools (that I can see) for making this happen. You just sit there and twist the arms on the dial setup until it looks right. But if we're trying to be truly precise, how can eyeballing parallelism of the dial possibly be correct? I have yet to find a tutorial on this.

Second - vibration! I've tried attaching my magnetic base holder to the base of the mill with the dial indicator touching the end of the milling table (as described above). However, just turning the mill up without actually cutting anything, the indicator fluctuates wildly. I have the mill bolted down pretty securely to a fairly heavy free-standing workbench. How the heck do I get around this? Try setups where the dial is as close to the base as possible? Use something besides a magnetic base?

Finally - general strategy. I have a Grizzly mini-mill and one of these sets from littlemachineshop :

http://www.littlemachineshop.com/pro...ProductID=1259

But man is it ever a PITA to find a place to plant the thing that makes it useful. Should I be thinking about mounting it on the mill, or something seperate? Any general advice here would be great


Thanks guys.

[nashyboy]

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