Hello "bench top machines" people... went down to the shop today and worked / tossed around ideas for our next moves!!! Also put the spindle together with the new bearings.
Things we talked about...
- Chip pan and some sides to contain chips
Thinking about making the chip pan out of 1/4 plywood and fiber glassing it.... them some small "walls" at the ends of the table and some sort of back stop behind the machine and maybe a removable shield for the front of the table..... our primary focus with the chip pan is that it be small, not looking to build a water tight VMC style enclosure, sorta like catch 80% of the flying chips and we will be happy.
- Gas spring for the head
Weighed the head of the mill with all the goodies on it and she came out to about 100lbs... did some testing with a 90lbs spring we had laying around and it seemed to work really well!! going to order one tonight from Mcmaster. The plan will be to mount the gas spring behind the column with some brackets off the Z carriage.
(the grizz so far... notice the "new" used Hoffman enclosure for the electronics. The new base for the machine is the bottom half of a super vintage tool box with some slight structural modifications... more on this later!)
(Weld up a few holes, smear some bondo, slather her in paint and you got yourself a nice enclosure for cheap!!....... "Bobs your uncle")
(the sharpie chicken scratch on the column is attempting to represent the bracket that will wrap around the back of the column to mount the gas spring)
(some improvised mounting of the gas spring for testing purposes)
(Here is the video i shot as we where testing the 90 pound spring. Thoughts ? )
https://youtu.be/WxY9aO-8SBQ
(after the gas spring shenanigans we put the spindle together. Sorry for the lack of along the way photos... grease covered hands and pictures are tough! )
(the bearings for the spindle as well as the "drive barrel thing")
(yummy grease....)
(ta-da!)
(When it came time for the Chinese craftsman to chamfer the outside edge of the spindle snout he must of used a hammer and chisel! it looked really bad so we chucked up the spindle in the grinder and cleaned it up! much better now... lol)
The end..... for now!!!
-Nick