The Home Machinist!

If the mill is a Taiwanese clone or something of that type I would just take the time to find a replacement table that is obviously missing from that one. It will not be nearly rigid enough for real milling but at least you won't be in chopping things up and making it unable to do other work. The ta...

Well this is thematically a little out of place for this thread but I put my first lathe a 14x40 in here years ago so might as well put in it's half replacement. I say half because I got a Monarch 10EE to do 90% of my usual small size jobs. Everyone has seen one of those and it's not special so I di...

Well the last mill I posted in this thread must have been like 8 or 9 years ago. My Lagun FTV-1. It was a great mill but over the years I found some issues with the work I do. It had more power than the R8 spindle could take. Too much tool pull out. The table was a bit small also. I had bought a Cin...

Why not get a quote from Xometry or Protolabs? Considering how little they pay machine shops they must be able to offer a low price. Pretty sure it's all online too and the turnaround is very fast.

This isn't in a particularly small horizontal mill (No.4 Cincinnati) but you can just scale it to the size of your machine. I had to fix some parts for a guys backhoe that had wallowed out the pivot holes pretty badly. Boring bar I had wasn't rigid enough for the very rough surface and long stick ou...

As mentioned earlier Parts and Parts has probably the most parts for old K&T and Cincinnati mills. When I talked to him it was 7 warehouses. The prices at the time, about 4 years ago where staggering. He was used to selling to rail, over the road, oil companies and such. Old business that still ...

Here is my fixture plate. Just uses little plastic plugs. The design has hardened bushings for about 12mm down from the surface so you can use dowels as fences. The plugs fit in the smooth section. A few are missing I need to replace. Fixture plate is too small for my machine but I got it used for a...

My guess would be it is a side effect of another VERY useful feature. It seems every time I see a lathe that can run both cross and long feeds at the same time they have a feed reverse lever of some sort on the apron. My 10EE does, my lathe that requires me to change feed direction on the headstock ...

I am not arguing that DROPros are bad. They are really nice to deal with and their stuff works well. But they are not built to the level of other units and the Jenix ones I use are both cheaper, (I think the 4 axis setup you see on my machine was $695 complete), and made better. Armored cables, cast...

My own experiences with DRO installation is that you should ignore the installation kit unless it is specifically made for your machine (and they never are) and just put it where it can meet all your needs. This means making custom brackets. This isn't hard but it can be time consuming. The first th...

Do you know someone with a CNC lathe? They will turn any lead you want.

I have Korean made Jenix units on my manual machines. http://www.digitalreadoutsystem.com/Jenix/jenix_dro.htm . I have three of them and just ordered another for my Monarch 10EE. As much as I wanted a Newall the cheapest price I could get was $1700, the Jenix was $530. They use glass scales. Lathe o...