How to buy a mill machine

I just drove 2,000 miles to film your most requested video hey guys welcome back to build something cool today I'm gonna talk about how to buy a milling machine but before we could do that we have to find one well I was talking to my friend Jason over at fireball tools and he said hey Dale I've got the perfect milling machine for you problem is it's in Spokane Washington and I'm here in San Francisco so it's about a 2,000 mile round-trip but well worth it so I'm gonna take you on the adventure up to Spokane visit Jason and show you the whole process to buying a milling machine and checking it out hey Jason good to see you again thank you so this is the machine I just drove a thousand miles for yes what's its history I ran the numbers this is a 1991 Bridgeport knee mill this machine is pretty unique the business that this came out of they did light manufacturing but they also employed handicapped and disabled so I think it's utterly awesome and this machine came out of the maintenance department of that facility so this thing's in perfect shape I wouldn't say it was worth me driving a thousand miles for I think so because they're just hard to find in a just general clean condition anymore I just they don't come up on Craigslist very often so I think this might be a good candidate for you excellent all right guys so we're gonna test this out Jason's gonna go do some stuff for your fireball tool Oh hold on hold on come back here a minute yes you promised me advice for this I got you covered stay right here all right I got you covered Dale you can pick any one out of this basket a whole video on destroying vices when you're talking to somebody you need to be very clear when you say you want a new vice or the advice comes with it that it's in good shape I know the biggest fear in buying a new machine is it going to be worth the value so that's what we're going to do today we're going to go through this entire mill we're going to check it out I want to talk about how you want to ascertain or how you want to figure out is this a good mil for the work that you need to do no matter what there's always wear on a milling machine you just have to determine how much wear you want you've just found your machine you found on Craigslist you give a guy call hello what kind of questions you want to ask what you want to ask how long has he owned it how long did he use it how did he use it and the best way to check it out is actually show up to the guy shop and go through it so I put together a little toolkit of things I can bring to the location so I can actually check out the quality of the machine so I always bring a dial indicator on a stand I bring a square I also bring screwdrivers and all sorts of little things so if I need to take something off or take it apart I do there's basically four types of people are gonna buy a milling machine you have your tool and a guy he wants one as though it just came off the factory floor the third guy is the machinist now he's going to be really particular because he's going to use this every day all day long and he's after a certain quality but he doesn't need to have the highest quality like the tool-and-die guy then there's us guys the home machinists we want to get the best machine we can and we want to get as tight as we can but we don't want to pay five $10,000 for it we want to find it at a more reasonable price then you have your fabricator your welder that kind of guy really what he wants to be able to do is just cut a slot or drill a series of holes really accurate so the standard that he needs is as long as the motor runs it's good there's a real skill to taking a look at a machine because you have to remember the owner of the machine is standing right next to you most of the time and you don't want to stress them out you don't want to make him worried because there's a lot of things you're going to do so there's certain things I'd like to do when I look at a machine I like to do the simplest things first and then I start getting in a little more detailed a little more detailed so that's what we're going to do first we just kind of take a general look at the Machine what shape is it in is it clean now sometimes a dirty machine isn't a bad deal okay when it's clean sometimes they might be trying to hide something so just take a look at it what shape is the pain in is it reasonable usually this area here will be all chipped up because of the chips flying off you want to look up into this area here what's it look like here's a really great example these aren't the original nuts or they've been abused in some way this I'm not worried about this is really common to have a little bit of wear on these so when you turn these handles what you're really looking for is does it get tight so we're here in the center when we come all the way to the end here if it starts getting tight we're starting to see signs of wear same thing with this here same with the knee we want to see how much wear there is now like I said before no matter what there's always wear on a milling machine you just have to determine how much wear you want so you want to be aware of when you're looking in the middle is that the size that you can go now a lot of guys want to go I want a big table well the problem is when you get to a big table this one here is actually the larger table this is the 48 you end up having to reach too far to use the handles that far out there's actually four different table sizes there's a 32 of 36 a 42 and a 48 so you also have different size motors this particular one has a two-horse motor on it I think it came in as a 1 and a half and a 2 and a 3 now if you're looking at one of these that's not a Bridgeport it's a Chinese version or a Taiwan version I had one that actually had a two-speed motor so it was a step with a two-speed motor so that meant I got a total of 16 speeds off that so it was really very convenient machine to use so now we want to see what type of accessories came with because that also kind of changed the price this one here as a dro with it it also has the original Bridgeport power feeds not just the X but also the Y this is a very rare box this is worth a little bit of money so we want to run these through we'd give it a try so this is a rapid Traverse we can check the speed we can slow it way down speed it up back to rapid traverse so you see how that sounds the power was consistent the sound was consistent going both ways one of the great things about this milling machine it comes with the Dro dro stands for digital readout so these scales actually will change with the table moving now it used to be a big advantage to getting a dro with the milling machine because they used to be so expensive but now you can go onto eBay get glass scales which glass scales are the best scales that for reading because they don't change or they don't expand with temperature you can get one of those setups for a bridge fort for around two hundred two hundred fifty bucks so this is great to have on it because I don't have to install it but at the end of the day it really doesn't add that much value to the milling machine now the next thing was we want to determine we've already looked at the whole machine and we're going okay this is worth looking into deeper so now we want to look actually at the ways and you'll see on the waves they have these little half moons and these are actually where the oil is able to settle in so there's always a film of oil kept between the ways now does the pattern stay the same if it started to get thinner and thinner well we have some where but like I said where's not bad matter in what level you want to work at we can also look at the table this table here is in beautiful shape we have that same pattern up here it's consistent across the top we don't have any mill marks nobody's like you know crash this it's really an excellent excellent shape next thing you want to look at you want to take a look at the dials what kind of shape are the dials in can you read them the next thing we want to check we want to check the quill and like I said I've never found the outside of the quill to be worn or damaged but you still want to lower it down and take a look because if it is this is not a repairable part if this is loose you don't have a milling machine you have a drill press before you put the collet in first you want to reach in here and you want to see what kind of condition this is in if there's any rust or pitting that's a sign that this machine possibly wasn't stored crap Klee and there may be other parts that are rusty this one here is in really nice shape but I'm going to tell you I actually had one that had some rust in here and all I did is I took some rust removal put it on a rag stuffed it in there came back a couple hours later it's in perfect shape had no problems at all what I'm feeling for now when I'm going with this tightening this up is it gritty how's that feel so this feels really really nice that is solid up here we have the variable speed head so this heads making a little bit of noise that doesn't worry me because that's just more of a maintenance issue down here is where the problem is we can't replace these parts but we can replace these so let's give it a try and see how it works this is now spinning we should be able to click this there we go this one's a little stiff but now we can see the cool handles moving we have three speeds we want to check all three I'm not hearing any grinding everything's working if I wanted to I can have this run all the way down and see if it automatically returns I know that since this is working I can get the automatic return or the automatic stop to work without a problem it's usually just something sticky in the levers here so this this is good this is great Luke will is great let's try the backyard so that's really solid now what I was listening for was their change in the sound of the motor and everything up there no changes so that is excellent there's nothing to worry about there we're gonna check the run out now on this milling machine and the challenge here is this is locked in so it's hard to spin we're gonna actually come up here to the back gear and disengage it and that'll give us the free flow to test this we're moving about two to three tents which is excellent we should be out about two tents at the most that run out the problem could be the way the kaulitz fit in this is actually a Chinese call it so there could be some error there there could be a little bit in the pin but we're showing some just excellent numbers right there next we're gonna do actually physically test it we're gonna run this all the way in and allit and we want to see how it feels that if if it gets really stiff at the ends well that is telling us that there's a lot more wear in the center this one here of course is excellent these ways are really consistent you can take a look at example at the front in the back to see what it should look like and then see if it compares the same way in the middle our next challenge is we want to find out how much wear there might be in this machine we're gonna start out with a dial indicator because if we're finding a lot of where we want to determine how much there is and we can measure some of it but that's not always the best way to do it we need to actually do a physical test we're going to bring it up against the gauge now well we've moved this we should see oh that's funny that's funny this the system is so smooth so I'm bumping up against it looking at the the indicator an indicator keeps moving a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more it's because this is such a smooth system I'm actually pushing the whole table and the screws turning a little bit allowing it to move right now we're getting actually quite a bit of movement here we're getting about 2,000 so we're a little sloppy here but I'm not too worried about it because we'll actually tighten up the Gibbs and test it again now we're also dealing with we have the Gibbs here that are moving and we also have the Gibbs from the X moving so let's take this we're going to lower it down and now we're just going to test the Gibbs on the wide on the y-axis and we're getting about 2,000 so so that's really good but I feel we can actually tighten up these Gibbs and give just a little bit more accuracy out of a lot of them so now here's things people ignore a lot is checking the Z's so we're going to actually see if it's square we're going to bring in our machinist square here and we're going to simply just use we have a shim here it's with 1000s and that's about what we want if this is the type machine at 12 inches that's about when this should come into contact in the gap see that's really good let's tighten up the table that's nice now if this was a little sloppier it didn't measure out the problem is we need to tighten up the Gibbs and check it but you'll also find out that this will also have we're probably more in the center or in one area than anyplace else so as you're inspecting this machine take a look at this screw now you're gonna have a hard time seeing if the screws worn out five thousands ten thousands but if you can tell there's a difference between the threads here and here the threads have gotten thinner you could do a quick visual inspection to determine what shape the screw is in backlash in the screw is really important to understand now we do have a dr all on this and that'll help cancel that out but we want to find out how much where there is is there we're actually in the nut or is it actually in the screw and the screw is probably more worn in the center than it is on the edge but we want to check what it is on both ends and then the center and do a comparison with that we'll know what kind of condition the screws actually and probably the rest of the machine we're going to zero out the needle we're going to zero out the handle here so we're going to give it just a little preload and then we're going to turn this one full revolution and then we're going to come back to zero and see what the difference is okay went back to zero identical here as it is here so we have no problems with the screw in the center and now if I wanted to because I got no backlash here that means we probably have nowhere in the screw but what I would normally do is check this end and that end and then compare it but we are rocking on this machine but let's say we had a little bit of slop here let's say we had about ten thousands out we want to be around let's say three to five thousandths we can come in here we can actually adjust this nut because it's a split nut you could actually clamp that together and get a little tighter fit on the screw so we had tighten it up here so it moves nice and smooth and get rid of the backlash check it on this end see if it's consistent if the screws worn we've actually helped it out a lot on the ends but we'll still have a little bit of slop here but it's going to be a lot better in the end the last question we want to answer is how much do you want to spend on a milling machine so I've kind of broke it down to four category we have your fabricator which he's your kinda your welder guy that needs to just cut some slots and some steel drill some holes accurately you don't need to spend that much money you can spend a thousand to less on a milling machine the next guy I caught the home machinist and he wants something that could do some really good work but but you know you get little willing to have a few problems with the machine I would say the price that machine is worth about a thousand to two thousand next you have your machinists this is the guy that's going to be on the machine every day you know he should spend two to three thousand and then you have the top of the list the tool-and-die guy which I classify this one as it for the tool and dye guy because it's such a tight perfect machine so we've shown you how we load it up and put it in a u-haul trailer and I got to tell you guys something about you hauls is they do have weight limits there's another video I did on moving machinery I moved from Atlanta Georgia to San Francisco last year and I had five flat tires because I overloaded so we actually divided the milling machine up into two spaces we took the bulk of the milling machine put in the trailer the trailer can handle about 1,800 pound capacity and take the head off of it the heads probably about two to three hundred pounds and we put that in the back of the truck to just help kind of balance out the weight so I wouldn't get any more flat tires I also want you to go check out Jason at fireball tools we did a shop tour together and his shop is like I said somebody had a great comment on it it's not a shop it's Disneyland for men alright guys until next time go out in your shop and build something cool thanks

Channel: Build Something Cool

Views: 171,426

Keywords: Milling machine, machining, metal lathe, fireballtool, fabracation, bridgeport, bridgeport clone, build something cool, Buying a milling machine, buying a machine, buying a lathe, Metal tips and tricks

Id: e72DVQSi7sI

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020