Hey people, recently I had to replace a gear in the mills gearbox.
Prior to this the machine seemed to be face cutting pretty well...
While I was waiting for the new gear to arrive I got out my precision level and bolted and levelled the mill to the bench - had the level on the table and I think I got it to within .006 of a millimetre according to the level specs and markings (was a 3 marking swing when turning the level 180 degrees...
Once i got the new gear fitted and the head back onto the machine I initially checked the sideways verticle alignment with a precision square off the table and against the side a piece of straight rod in the chuck, then for the last little bit, I used the square and the side of the chuck itself... this was all good, I did the same on the back to front alignment and it looked alright as well... shining a torch from behind and visually comparting the light gap at the top and bottom of the checking area...
What I am finding though now is that the mill is cutting more on the back side than the front side when I go to face a piece of work... I am not too sure how to adjust for this...
Today I had a new dial indicator arrive (the previous one crapped a cog shaft when it accidently got knocked off the bench and dropped 100 mill onto the swarf tray...
I thought that first I would check the head to verticle slide alignment for front to back... so I mounted the dial on the head and ran the guage down and back to the back face of the dovetail - the flat at the rear side of the dovetail... I trammed the machine down and there was a .15 mm difference as i brought the head down, I could only go about halfway down due to the stalk on the magnetic base for the dti being too long to go any lower...
now I am assuming that this is something to do with the dovetail adjustment - something I had to remove to get the head on and off and so probably is not adjusted correctly, as I am fairly new to this - with highschool being my last actual experience with machine shop stuff over 25 years ago I am wondering if anyone can give me some pointers for aligning the head correctly and for adjusting the gibs on the verticle slide... I was able to adjust the gibs on my C2 lathe compound, and cross slide without a drama... and did find a some good information for doing the main saddle gib adjustments which are a right pain to do lol...
Thanks in advance for any help offered
Prior to this the machine seemed to be face cutting pretty well...
While I was waiting for the new gear to arrive I got out my precision level and bolted and levelled the mill to the bench - had the level on the table and I think I got it to within .006 of a millimetre according to the level specs and markings (was a 3 marking swing when turning the level 180 degrees...
Once i got the new gear fitted and the head back onto the machine I initially checked the sideways verticle alignment with a precision square off the table and against the side a piece of straight rod in the chuck, then for the last little bit, I used the square and the side of the chuck itself... this was all good, I did the same on the back to front alignment and it looked alright as well... shining a torch from behind and visually comparting the light gap at the top and bottom of the checking area...
What I am finding though now is that the mill is cutting more on the back side than the front side when I go to face a piece of work... I am not too sure how to adjust for this...
Today I had a new dial indicator arrive (the previous one crapped a cog shaft when it accidently got knocked off the bench and dropped 100 mill onto the swarf tray...
I thought that first I would check the head to verticle slide alignment for front to back... so I mounted the dial on the head and ran the guage down and back to the back face of the dovetail - the flat at the rear side of the dovetail... I trammed the machine down and there was a .15 mm difference as i brought the head down, I could only go about halfway down due to the stalk on the magnetic base for the dti being too long to go any lower...
now I am assuming that this is something to do with the dovetail adjustment - something I had to remove to get the head on and off and so probably is not adjusted correctly, as I am fairly new to this - with highschool being my last actual experience with machine shop stuff over 25 years ago I am wondering if anyone can give me some pointers for aligning the head correctly and for adjusting the gibs on the verticle slide... I was able to adjust the gibs on my C2 lathe compound, and cross slide without a drama... and did find a some good information for doing the main saddle gib adjustments which are a right pain to do lol...
Thanks in advance for any help offered
