tapered gibs on me new mill

[jim]

i was using my mill (WEISS similar to chester champion 20V) at the weekend, milling across (y axis) got some chatter and "push off".

now what follows would have been avoided had i stripped the machine when i got it home, but just never got around to it

i stripped the bed off and cleaned everything up, the slideways all look hand scraped ,
reassembling the tappered gibs, i found that the adjuster screw was bottoming out on the threads. i'd adjusted it once and not noticed

2 mins with a tap and all is well again in Jim's workshop.

Every lathe i've had, i've HAD to strip and clean up and adjust, the mill came in looking ready to run, i really wanted to get going. thinking i'll have a look at it the following weekend.

you live and learn

[bogstandard]

This is standard on almost all of the smaller machine tools from the far east.

The way they keep the price down is to only assemble at the factory, not to set them up for use.

Some retailers do offer a set up service, but it is rather expensive, say 200 to 300 squid.

If you spend a full day or two going over the machine with a fine tooth comb, cleaning, tweaking and lubricating as you go, not only will you get a well running machine, you will learn all about it at the same time. Leaving things until they show their ugly head is one of the main reasons people give certain machines bad press. After they have spent wads of cash replacing loads of broken tooling, all caused by their eagerness to make something straight away.

I am sure that this is the reason a lot of newbies, who go it alone, end up selling their equipment off. They just find that machining isn't as straight forwards as they expected.

I am asked to occasionally look at used far eastern machines that people want to buy. Usually hardly ever been used, and no attempt has been made to set them up correctly.


Bogs

[Davo J]

 Jim, I understand what you’re talking about. I am just putting the head back on my 3rd H/V mill today, the first one had a tapered table, second had a warped table and many other faults. After tearing it down to go through everything the amount of cast iron grit was amazing. The don’t seem to clean out a hole (or anything else for that matter) after they have tapped it. So after re tapping all the holes I blew them out with the compressed air. I found 2 scratches from grit one the X and one on the Z that were hidden all clean now though. I cleaned up and repainted all the insides while it was down also. The outside will come latter as there are a far few chips were the bog, bondo (or whatever you want to call it) was broken.
Dave