Milling Machine Alignment: Tramming the HEad and Vise to Square and Parallel

[Music] hello Keith truck here biz machinery org so today I think what we're going to do is we're going to tram this milling machine in and when I say tram it in the best a term that you use when you get your head set where it's perfectly square with the table that you're working off of and you know I've done a video on this before where I used a cylinder square it's a little trick that I learned a long time ago so real quick and easy way of doing it and I think what we're going to do is we're going to start by trimming it using the cylinder square but then I'm going to come in and we've got this new tool that was sent to us from a viewer this is a product that they make from boarding research we're going to actually use this indicator to tech and see how Square I'm really getting things with my cylinder square so anyway that's going to be the game plan we're going to start by using cylinder square I'll show you that trick again and then we'll come in here and check our work alright so method number one here this is a cylinder square that I use this is actually a magnetic cylinder square so there's a magnet on the bottom it comes in here this has been ground square so it's a cylinder so it's square all the way around now I have to admit about this cylinders were used and I've never really had any really good way to check this to see how accurate actually is I've always just been working on the assumption that this square and that's probably not a very good assumption but based on past experience I think it's pretty darn close it may not be exactly square but it's pretty darn close but here's how you would use this method so I'm going to do is I'm going to drop the quill all the way down on this machine and I'm basically going to square things up off of the quill itself so this is a ground and hardened quill in here and you know in theory it should be square with things going up and down now granted if you have an old worn out milling machine that has wearing this it may not be as accurate as a new one but still it should be a pretty good indication I'm going to take my cylinder square and I'm just going to butt it up right against that and then using a light from behind I can come in here and I can tell okay it's touching in the top but there's a little gap in the bottom so now I'm just going to come in here and make a little adjustment I'm going to pull that bottom end and now it looks like it's touching all the way down so that should be square I'm going to take my wrench here and tighten my head back up and I'll go back and check it again after I tighten it just to make sure things haven't moved just from tightening up the head so I come in here again now again put my light behind it and it looks pretty good now you're seeing a little bit of light but it's an even amount all the way up and down it doesn't look like the top and the bottom Rev differ so I'm going to call it square in that axis and now the next thing I'm going to do is we'll come around here and move the square out to the front of the table or the front of the quill and we'll do this again and I can tell already just looking behind here that is touching at the bottom there's just a least a little bit of light at the top it is really really close but I'm going to go ahead and make a quick adjustment in this axis as well so I've made an adjustment now and Center I'm looking on the light on here it's kind of hard to tell for sure about it to me it looks like an even amount up and down there on camera it kind of looks like there's more at the top but I think it's just got dude reflections all right so I'm going to come back around now and I'm just going to check this way again just to make sure nothing has changed and if it looks good we'll get out the indicators and check it with the spindle sweater that way so we've got the spindle square in here now with the dial indicator method and again this tool is made by boring research you can check them out at boring research com they sell this set up here I think it's $85 so basically just one of my viewers has a company that he's making these kind of a little small business venture and anyway it looks like a pretty nice tool it's got four different places that you can put the indicators in here depending on how it what you're wanting to do now the most accurate way to do this is going to be put them as far apart because you're measuring an angle and obviously the the greater the distance between one in the other the more you're going to be able to measure the more you're going to be able to potentially fine-tune but if you're doing a vise or something you may not have this much width so you can adjust these indicators in and out put them in different slots as needed now one thing I'd caution you on is that you need to have in the descend the first one on this side of these on the first one on this side because if you don't your distance is going to be different from one in the other and your readings won't work out so you know the indicators are in there right now but first some we need to do is we need to calibrate this and make sure that we have our zeros because we don't know that these are exactly the same height they're just dropped down into a hole and there could be differences from one indicator to the other so the way we're going to do that is he actually ships a little less rare earth magnet with this thing that is stuck up in there really strong but we're just going to drop that on the table and make sure it's clean I got little metal shavings on my milling machine table here we're going to raise this up they have to reposition that little magnet when we get to the right height here is close all right and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take it to zero in fact I think I'm going to do is I'm going to zero it out come over here because I want to have a little bit of a tension or whatever in that indicator so that I've got some travel you know right there I would only had about what ten thousands travels so if I if it was out more than ten thousands it would go off and it wouldn't be a good measurement so we're just going to nice loosen bezel bezel up on this indicator well a little clip fell off I'll pick it up we're going to move this around and zero it right there okay now what I'm going to do is we're going to indicate off the same one I'm going to flip my whole of rig round here hang on a minute alright I had a little had to adjust something there someone to reezy row this okay so now I'm going to roll this around and we're going to zero this one and I'm going to have to go around to the backside to do this and you won't be able to see it on camera but I will zero it out and you'll it'll be calibrated so I know you can't see this it's going to have to trust me that I'm doing this correctly here pull these little things off again all right so that one's a zero the other one is zero and I'm just going to come back around to this one again and double-check it and it is zero now one thing to notice here is my zeros are in a little bit different position and that just has to do with how these these indicators are feeding down into this block it's not a big deal they're both calibrated so now what we're going to do is come down here and I think I'm going to do I think I'm going to raise the table up and I'm just going to put them on zero and if you look on this one we are about one two three and a half thousands different on this side on this side so this will be in my head going this way so let me get my wrenches out and we're going to make a quick adjustment and get this thing dialed in right where it needs to be all right guys I was playing around with this and ivory zero things where I actually have two zero is going up now more or less so this one's here in this one's here you can see right now we're off by about five thousandths what I'm going to do is we're going to pull this one in about half that amount so about right there so if you look you know I'm off a little billing the one but I'm just going to lower the table now and bring this one zero and this one's on zero as well so we're tram din so it's a fairly easy thing so basically what I'm doing is I'm just looking on this one and I'm moving half of my air out and then reezy row and things and pretty straightforward so let's go ahead we'll turn it 90 degrees and do the other side here so I turn it 90 degrees I got it set on here and I haven't touched anything just using the cylinder square now this one's on zero this one's maybe a quarter of a thousandth off each one of those lines is a half thousand so the cylinder square got that one pretty darn close and the other one was within really two-and-a-half thousands of being square which was probably good enough for most things particularly over this kind of distance so that's something else to take into consideration with doing this if you're if you know those right there are about six inches apart if you're using a 4-inch cutter though your errors it's not going to be off as much as it is if they're closer together so anyway I think you see how this Tool Works it's a very easy tool to use and it will really get it tuned in exactly like you want it as long as we're trimming things in I'm also go ahead and get my vise trimmed in square or parallel with the table here so to do this I just basically mounted a test indicator I'm just using a shared last word indicator here I've got it mounted into my spindle it's just on a little rod here and I've got it where it's going to touch the top of my vise which should be ground pretty flat to go across so what I'm going to do is just come in here I'm going to get on more let's see the end of the vise down here and we're just going to go in and move our table out until we zero it and now we're just going to roll the table down and as you can see as it goes it's falling off a little bit and I'm going to go to about the extended of the the travel on the indicator and what I have done here is I've got this bolt on this side fairly tight and this one here is snug but it's a little bit loose so I can basically pivot this vise off of this side which is why I'm starting on this side because when I bump it around this in is the end it's going to move so what I'm going to do is just basically take a little a dead blow hammer here and we're going to bump device whichever way it needs to go I'm going to take it to where that dials on zero then we'll go back to the end of the table down here I'm going to read 0 it I'm just moving the whole table in and out this way now I'm going to go all the way with I got a little bit jumped on me just a little bit on if you saw that it jumps about a half a thousands when I started going so I'm just going to I were just going to go with it I think we'll go all the way to the end of the table now and we're off by what is that about mm so again we're just going to bump the get back to zero I'm going to hug this one down a little bit now and we're going to go back to the other side and we're on zero again so now my wife is parallel with the the table so there you guys training 101 we've trimmed the head in in both accesses we trim the Vice in and what have I learned well my cylinder square method it works pretty good it's not exactly perfect but you know what for the majority of jobs as I'm doing that silver square trick is quick it is easy and it works but when I need to dial it in and get it exactly right I can go use that a spindle Square that I got from boring research and we can dial it in and that's also an easy method I will probably use both methods in my shop just depending on what I'm doing what kind of job I'm doing a lot of times what I'll do is I'll just go grab that spindle square before I do an important job and I'll just check it because you know as you use this mill your head can can move even if it's a little bit tight you know you got pressures on it you got things going on the shop it needs to be checked from time to time and the spindle square is a good way of doing that but when you really need a dial then I really like that indicator method as well as far as the vise goes this little test indicator method this is what I use all the time it is quick and easy it does not take a lot of time to trim a vise him you saw me you know less than five minutes I have this vise put on here and tram din unlike a lot of people I take my vise on and off the mill machine a lot depending on the job that I'm doing I'm not afraid to take it off I know some people they get their vise trimmed in they don't ever want to take it off because they don't want to have to trim it into em I actually don't worry about that like I said it's a quick and easy process and I think it's good again you need to check the trim on your vise because it can move over time it can things can come out of adjustment the bolts even though it's tight it can move particularly if you are doing some heavy milling or something you got a lot of forces going on here as well so two quick easy ways to check both the head and device to give you things tram din this machine is ready to go and we're about to do some machining and that's going to another video for a project I'm getting ready to start on thanks for watching guys we'll talk to you later [Music]

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 116,031

Rating: 4.9170985 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Milling Machine, Vintage Machinery, Georgia Museum of Agriculture, Metalworking, how to run a mill, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, Starrett, Last Word

Id: tU87cYRpyA8

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017