Indicating the Bridgeport Mill TIPS #426 pt 1 tubalcain

hello once again it's tubal-cain your youtube shop teacher and this time with a video dedicated to several uses of the dial indicator or test indicator on the Bridgeport mill there are probably hundreds of different possibilities and uses of test indicators on a Bridgeport mill and I'm just going to show you four of the basic ones that really everybody needs to know and would use pretty much in their daily work in a machine shop and I'm going to use these edge technology indicator holders and there's two different versions of these one is shank mounted and one has a clamp on it so I'll be using both of those for this demonstration so let's get started by sweeping in or tramming the head I made a video quite a while back showing how to use the pro trim also by edge technology and I may show that again as they have several different models or one quite a bit smaller than those so I'd like to get a hold of one of those and demonstrate that for you but these are rather expensive instruments compared you're just using a standard test indicator in one of these holders and the holders are more reasonably priced typically in the forty or fifty dollar range as you know the head on a Bridgeport mill can be swiveled or tilted right to left and also it can be tilted in what we call the nodding position moving out and I'm not going to talk about that because that's already been set on this and not all milling machines have that feature so let's just talk about trimming it from left to right how that's done and the importance of it now looking at the head from this angle again you can see with this protractor that the head tilts from left to right and the other protractor here is nodding and we're not going to talk about that as I just mentioned but you can of course set it and everybody does simply with the zero mark there and for many purposes that's good enough but it doesn't really get it all that close and will probably still be a few thousand soft as I will demonstrate here momentarily I'm going to exaggerate here a little bit just to emphasize the importance of having the head but if you're a degree or so off but let's just say that we're 10 degrees off what would happen as you're milling you're milling cutter would be moving across your work like this you would not get a flat surface and you'd be cutting with this corner rather than all the way across the face of the mill so you need to have a tram similarly if you were drilling and the head does not squared up the drill is coming down like this as your drill and you would get an enlarged hole of course that's a great exaggeration in order to tilt the head you need to loosen one two three four nuts but not very loose they should remain snug and then with your wrench on this bolt you're able to tilt it that's a worm up there so I will not be showing that as I adjust the head I will be concentrating on the indicator many people do not realize that you can also square up the head using a precision square against these two surfaces that I have put a little orange sticker on I'll take those stickers off now just to show you but moving the square across the table watch the blade now up against this and this point you can square it and get it pretty darn accurate you can use feeler gauges here or here also to double-check that that can be done in the nodding position in this direction as well but you need a precision square when you do that not a carpenter's square but that's not what I'm going to do now I'm going to an indicator these edge technology indicator holders can hold indicators in two different ways one and by the way I added this thumb screw here there was a set screw in there I prefer this for quick removal but there's a hole here that holds a standard 5/32 stem and that's pretty handy you can also hold your indicator if it has a dovetail and this one has three dovetails one here here and then the one that's being held you can see the dovetail holder right there so we can use these either way there are scores of different kinds of test indicators I would avoid the kind that reason a tenth of a thousandth that may just be confusing but this rather small faced one here made by MIT to Tokyo is a nice one with a stem and it also has adapters for dovetails but at particularly like this one because it just reads in thousands although the face is relatively small now the other one here attesa reads in half thousandths but it's a much larger dial so I'll be using both of these you can also use last word indicators some people tram the Vice this is a 5 inch vise but if you have a six inch vise such as a Curt you can trim the vise itself using the pro tram or this type of indicator holder and edge technology also produces a mini pro tram that is even ideal they say for smaller milling machines mini mills but I'm going to take the vise off and I'm going to tram the table rather than the vise you can set the indicator holder such that you're really tramming a large radius for instance that's about seven or eight inches there so and that's probably more than you need I'm going to shorten it up here just a little bit so it fits in the camera frame frame and even at that I'm almost six inches or a total of 12 inches as I swing this around from one side to the other it is necessary that you have your table cleaned of all chips and also if you have any high spots that is you got Nicks and raised spots you need to stone your table but that should be done from time to time anyway be careful not to break off the tip or damage the tip of your indicator as you swing this in the tea slots so you either need to lift this up a little bit as you rotate it or I sometimes use a ruler or a piece of paper which you'll see here momentarily in order to not damage the tip as I swing this although we have a bit of a chamfer here it's nice to take a piece of paper like this and that allows you to swing it off and then similarly as you come back on on the other side use the paper just an idea I really like the joints on this product because they are easy to move but yet they stay where you put them some people use a pair of parallels that have no holes and unmatched parallels to do this again your table must be clean or you get a false reading and you can bring it around like that that way you don't have to worry about the t-slots again that's just an idea I'm throwing out this is the indicator holder with a 3/8 shank being held in a 3/8 skaaland now zeroing in just a little bit here I am touching the table and I'm going to raise the knee until I bring it to zero now I'll swing this around to the other side and see with the reading in you and of course the idea here is that we need the exact same reading here as when I swing it around to the other side you cannot see it I'll bring the camera around but it's just a few thousand soft not very far off and that was by using the square method on those lugs up on the head and you need to check this from time to time because for no given reason sometimes the head tilts just a little bit from heavy cuts and other abuse that might take place on a machine so you can see that I'm what almost four thousands off so now off camera I'm going to loosen those four nuts on the front of the head and I like to use this big breaker bar with a three-quarter inch socket so they are just slightly loose not so that the head can wobble and now I have the wrench on the warm up there that I showed you and I'm going to try to split the difference here I always end up by going the wrong way first that's wrong-way Corrigan so repositioning the wrench bring it right into that position zero out swing it around and see what I get on the other side and back around on the other side I'll take the paper out of there zero in just a little bit and you can see I've got a little bit of a reflection there that I'm really spot-on now and it's so it was that simple I must emphasize now that I was turning the the belt pulley on the top and since I really don't like to stick my hands in there I have unplugged that as I removed the power from this machine you absolutely do not want to turn the switch on when you have an indicator in there you will hurt yourself and certainly brick the indicator so now I'm going to tighten up those four bolts and I'm going to watch this as I do it because sometimes there's a little movement so I have the wrench on there and I'm snugging up one like I'm tightening the head on an engine and I have tightened all four of them and it did not move and then I'll swing this around and take yet one more reading to make sure nothing has moved and then the head is trimmed in and of course you don't have to use paper I just do that and it is right on it would be nice to have two cameras when I do this so the head is trimmed perfectly from right to left and then I would do the same thing with nodding and I'm not going to show that so now let's move on to the next possibility my Bridgeport 5 inch vise has keys on the bottom so I'll flip it over mount it and see how accurate that it truly is make sure your vise is clean and your table is clean when you mount your vices this is a starett last word dial indicator or test indicator I should say and notice how I have shortened up the whole indicator holder here but of course this is held with a 5/32 peg in the holder and that peg could just as well be held in a collet or a drill chuck it doesn't really matter and you need to make sure that your fixed draw and you always want to indicate off of your fixed draw does not have any high spots so stone that if necessary and since there are plenty of grooves and nicks and damaged to this fix draw what I sometimes like to do is to mount a parallel in there and then I will do the indicating over the parallel that's the way a lot of people do it you see the advantage of using this type of indicator holder is that your table may be dropped way way down and you don't want to raise the table up so you've got to reach with this it's just that I have the table in the upper position right now so bringing the quill down or raising the table whatever you want to do I will bring the indicator tip up against that parallel which is just snugged up in the vise until I have it on zero and then just run it from one end to the other and we'll see how far off we are if at all they call adjust that using the cross feed and surprisingly I am about three or four thousandths off now there isn't any way to correct that other than to take the keys off of the bottom so that's just some inherent problem with this vise and I'm not worried about that I'm going to show you another way of doing that with another vise so that we get it perfectly on zero this is a 5-inch Brown and sharp vice notice that it has no provisions for using keys it's just strictly flat on the bottom so I'll clean that off wherever I'll clean the table and we'll mount this and indicate it but it will be free to swing there are almost endless possibilities in different ways of doing things in the machine shop so much of it up to your own imagination and creativity but what I've done here has put the Brown & Sharpe vise in the lengthways direction and I'm going to use two bolts here to fasten it down again no keys this one is snugged up the other one here is loose and I am able to pivot or swing on the vise on this one well I'll initially square it up using an angle block up against this surface here of the table just a little bit of a look of the camera range here and then rounded sharp square and I'm bringing that up against the fix jaw and swinging the vise until it appears to be square that's pretty good now I will snug this and we'll check it with the indicator and correct it I'm sure it will need some Corrections all right you see the setup now and I'll run the indicator right across the jaw this time because it's in pretty good condition the fixed jaw and I don't see much damage there at all and with the cross or the longitudinal feed I'm bringing it in to zero you could turn the face of the indicator also and then I'll just with the y-axis run out across and see how far off we are and it's about four thousandths so using a brass wrap here I will just tap the vise into about well I'll split the difference there and see how it looks just zero and run it back across and I am with and a half a thousand I will tighten both bolts and always check it again after you tighten the t-slot that's just in case it has moved a little bit a little deflection here in the middle so that jaw may not be perfectly straight but for all intents and purposes this vise is indicated in to close to perfection and it would be ready to use so that's how you indicate a bison on the Bridgeport mill or any other milling machine for that matter well that completes part 1 of this video on using the indicators on the Bridgeport mill I'll see you soon in part 2 this is trouble game you

Channel: mrpete222

Views: 38,104

Rating: 4.9271464 out of 5

Keywords: clausing mill, index mill, burke mill, millrite mill, doall mill, enco mill

Id: 0i7_uZdf7hM

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2018