The Home Machinist!

Thanks John and yes I was considering it for the Heald in the vertical spindle. It just seems like a fun fab project. I have located some of the b&s tooling new but ebay can be such a good sorce for the cheap used common taper tooling. It seemed like a worth while project.

This maybe a dumb question but I will ask anyhow. Is there any reason I can't turn a spindle for an old mill with a brown and sharpe taper? The goal would be for more readily available tooling of a different taper. I have had the spindle out and it seems like an easy turn on the lathe. The only issu...

Thanks guys. I got it all back together now with all new gib screws. I am glad the rasp worked because working it out with a drill didn't work since it was such a hard screw with a clean break. I have welded nuts onto broken bolts before with great results but this one was just too deep in the hole....

Nevermind. This was one of those cases where it helps to ask the question. I took a coarse wood rasp that had enough bite on the gib side. Worked like a champ. Thanks

I have a broken gib screw on the saddle for my mill. It is hardened 1/4" -20 tpi. It is broken off about an 1/8" inside the partially threaded hole(ie about 1/2" is in an unthreaded hole and 3/4" threaded). As seen in the picture about an 1/8" is protruding out on the gib si...

Sorry about the picture orientation above. I couldn't figure out from my stupid smart phone how to rotate them. Stephen

Hi John. I am glad to see you doing this to your machine since I was planing the same project in a couple of weeks. Just have to get a few other issues out of the way first. I will include a couple pics here. As you can see my quill feed mechanism needs some work. I have many of the parts and can fa...

Thanks for the help. Now starts the long, hard journy of finding tooling. I am lucky that I enjoy challenges.

I have posted some on this in other parts of the forum but got sent here. I am trying to identify a taper in an old milling machine to verify correct tooling. Here are my numbers on the spindle taper: depth is 4.81 in--major is 1.063in --minor is 0.89 in. I come up with a 0.432 in/ft taper (about 2....

1950's model by Heald machine works. It's a horizontal machine with a heald vertical head. A rare bird as I understand. Thanks for any help. I will start measuring.

I have an old milling machine that I recently purchased and I am trying to verify the tooling taper. The sales literature lists the vertical head spindle as being "standard milling machine tapered spindle #30". Another place lists it as "#30NMM taper". So, if I were to leave the ...

It would be more in keeping with reality to say that horizontal mills can be converted to verticals with the addition of an optional head, although that may or may not be true of the Heald. Most vertical mills are built as verticals. As you alluded, the Heald mill is not a common or well known mach...