Center a Rotary Table in Under a Minute Without an Indicator

as a machinist one of my least favorite activities is setting up fixtures and accessories screwing up a vise on a mill trimming in the head setting up a rotary table I'll require the use of indicators which can be fairly time-consuming I don't know about you but I'd rather spend that time making parts and staring at indicators so over the years I've come up with various techniques to reduce the amount of time I spend staring at indicators I did a video on one of them a while back how to indicate the vise on a milling machine in just one pass I had pretty good feedback on that one so I thought I'd I do another video and share a technique I use to align a rotary table on the milling machine this one involves a little bit of a special tool that I made up it's not much to it it's basically just a half inch dowel pin pressed into a piece of brass okay then the outer diameter this brass is turned to a snug fit inside the bore on the rotary table this outer diameter is has a little bit of a taper to it about three thousandths over the length of it starts out about the same size as the bore and expands up to a little larger so when you drop it in it snugs up and takes out all the play between the tool and the table this is important because any play between the between the tool and the table or the bore of the table is going to is going to mean misalignment so if we want to get this thing as close as possible to the centerline of the mill we want all that play to be removed hence the taper this one I just made out of a piece of brass I had on hand I suppose if you wanted to make one a little more permanent maybe a piece of steel might be better or if you had the capability even hardened and ground steel will be better yet but this thing served me well works it's worked well for a number of years so I'd like to share with you a little bit about about how I go about using this thing traditionally to Center up a rotary table you first have to bolt the thing down to your mill table any have to hang an indicator on the spindle okay and sweep sweep around inside the bore of the table adjusting your XY axis until the indicator reads true all the way around okay that's that's a lot of fooling around it can take some time on a good day it may take you four or five minutes on a bad day which we all have on occasion might take you ten minutes my opinion it's a lot of waste of time so I came up came up with this idea and I think what you see how it's used I think you'll agree it's it's a lot better method and it takes a lot less time so to use this thing mounted in the spindle I use a collet don't try to use a chuck because it Chuck's nut again concentricity is critical Chuck's not that concentric that's how it's much better so just install it in a collet okay then run run your tool down until it goes into the bore of the rotary table all the way down until it starts to Snug up and bolt your table down I just retract the the tool and we're done okay centerline - this table is lined up right down to the centerline of the axis of the spindle now I know I'm sure there were critics out there they'll say well yeah it's that's pretty cool it's a cool technique but there's no way it can be as accurate as indicating the rotary table so let's just throw an indicator on here and see how well we did all right let's zero it out here and then we'll zoom in so you guys can see what's going on a little bit see how well see how where we lined it up okay it's looking pretty good I'm looking at about maybe a half thousand total indicator run out all the way around I think we're good to go

Channel: Toms Techniques

Views: 97,196

Rating: 4.9569893 out of 5

Keywords: rotary table, indicate, indicator, milling machine, rotary, setup, milling, how, bridgeport, mill, machining, machinist, processes, techniques, how to, turning, lathe, threading, thread cutting, South Bend, Logan, Clausing, Delta, Sheldon, Atlas, Bridgeport, Starrett, Lufkin, Mitutoyo, instructional, tutorial, educational, metal, metalworking, shop, machinery, tubalcain, millwork, facing, drilling, grinding, grinder, Harrison, hardinge

Id: GjezShYnoEU

Length: 4min 40sec (280 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2013