Hi Lads, After the ram jammed on my Bridgeport , the whole machine ended up having to be moved off the cemented in base situated in the corner of the workshop to gain access to work on the mill. As you can imagine this was a proper pain so I have decided to make a jackable frame with castors on it so the mill can be moved if needed. It will not be the sort of thing you can wheel in and out each time you want to use the machine but should make it easier to move if it needs worked on or if something large ever needs to be mounted on the table that would normally be hitting the wall or other machines.
So after a Google search or two I had a rough plan and a pile of scrapyard related materials, as usual my build was to use what I had rather than build with what you would choose in an ideal world.
This is the mill as its been standing for months in the middle of the floor on rollers
This is the plan
These are the raw materials to construct out of, I thought the orange formed plates might have been included but they were too narrow for the castors to fully rotate
Cut up the large angle into lengths on the big bandsaw , its working nice now its been repaired
All the components cut out, the castor supports had to made from two bits of 5 x 3 inch angle welded together to make some channel , I notched the corners of the large 4 x 4 angle
Draged the welding table over and cleaned up the angle with wire brush on a grinder, the angle is 100 years old or so, reclained from a fire escape, its been lying about for 20 years but I knew it would come on handy one day !
The castor supports were tacked then welded top and bottom
Then the frame all welded up some arc and mainly MIG , I don't think it will come apart anyway. The nuts are M28 or 1 1/18th ish, the plates welded behind the nuts are to give more clearance for the bolt head. I also added a towing eye that was lying about that might come in handy
Next job was to drill four 20mm holes that the mill will bolt to the frame with, used the mill itself to do these with
A coat of machine green paint to match the mill
Then when that was drying it was time to do the bolts and plates for jacking. I turned points on the large studding , drilled recesses for these to locate into in the plates , then welded the nuts to the studs to make the large jack bolts and also the smaller M16 bolts to bolt the mill to the base, again these were made as I already had studding lying about
The finished frame ready for the mill to be mounted, Otto my quality control hound looks bored as he found no defects ! The frame is a two man lift type weight now !
The mill mounted in the frame and bolted down, I used the chain hoist to winch it up and my mate Dave quickly rolled the frame under, it takes two people to push the mill, the castors I used were the hard rubber tyre type so maybe cast iron would roll with less effort ? Anyway it does the job and is movable with a bit of effort it jacks up level once in position using the jacking bolts, the splash guard fits ok too
I would say the basic idea is good for most size milling machines really, dual purpose as you get good jacking points to level the machine but also much easier to move when needed.
Cheers Mick.
