Optimum MB4 - Revisit after 6 years

[Music] hey welcome back to this old milling machine recently i got a lot of comments under my videos what about my milling machine do i still like it do i think it was the right decision to buy it what did i modify how did the epoxy adjustment of the column work out where did i get the iso30 holder why am i that look good looking things like that so in general i would say yes i'm still happy with the milling machine it was the right machine at the right time for the right money and it fits the work i do very well it's not the ideal machine the ideal machine i would buy a philmont pico max 51 for example a good manual swiss made mill drill with a semi cnc control but those are 50 000 euros upward and that's a little bit steep at the moment it might happen at some point but not now so this is the next best thing for me and i'm not going to buy a used deckle two room milling machine because for my purposes they are not ideal they are very good two room milling machines but they are not great at drilling tapping for example you cannot tap power tap on a decklef p1 milling machine because from factory they don't have a spindle reverse and the quill travel with 60 millimeters is anemic so now and replacement parts cost you an arm and a leg if you shoot the the spindle bearings on a tackle fp1 good luck you will have to find somebody who has a cylindrical grinder and knowledge about spindles on this machine that's like if i buy high-end tapered roller bearings that's maybe 200 euros though it's easy i did i did modifications to the machine yes but none of them were really necessary it's more about my learning experience and just adding that little bit of you know just make it nicer for example changing the handles here again usually there are some round knobs that i have these off the market handles these are a standard part that you get from norelem or misumi i changed the spindle to iso30 which i talked briefly about my last video the iso30 spindle is a replacement part from kami machine tools here in germany they are a reseller for imported asian asian machines and they they stock the complete quill and spindle assembly and i have a short section about that in picture format unfortunately i didn't film many of the modifications i did in a recent time because i had to do them kind of on a hurry because there was always work coming in and out so i have pictures and i will do a hopefully decent job of voiceover here is the iso30 spindlehead arrived from kami machine tools as you can see it had drive docks but i removed them i'm not sure if i'm going to put them back or make my own the original ones are really crusty in theory iso30 would be plenty strong enough with a threaded drawbar to drive the maximum torque of my milling machine and lowest gear through the taper alone via friction fit without having to rely on the drive docks but in a case of a crash it still could slip so i'm not sure about that yet but as you can see it was quite dirty but that's it that's a chinese oem part so i didn't expect too much here is the iso30 spindle on the left you can see the slot for a drift to get out a more stable tool they put in the slot for no real reason i think they used the same casting for the quill like they would on the morsi before spindle i will take care of that slot later for a very important reason on the right is my old morsi before spindle with a morsi but two reduction in the spindle the isis 30 is a little bit longer on the on the spindle nose also for no real apparent reason you could fit an iso 30 well within the more super four dimension spindle on the right but for whatever reason they decided to extend the spindle and create a little bit more overhang but it i suspected that it would not make any big difference and in hindsight it doesn't i decided to get rid of the slot in the quill housing because this is a way where chips can get their way into the quill and drop down into the lower bearing of the spindle which is an unshielded open tapered roller bearing so i took a piece of aluminium and i shaped it on the belt sander so it fits into the slot as a snug fit i ground it slightly tapered so it cannot fall in some steel filled epoxy very similar to jb weld rounded off the whole operation just decreased everything and slapped on a good amount of the epoxy the overhanging epoxy was then filed off and cleaned off so it's blending perfectly into the surrounding surface of the quill so another thing that changed is the quill clamp normally this machine has a quill clamp here with a split clamping piece that pinches around the quill and i wasn't the biggest fan of it because it tended to move the quill off center tiny bit and it's also not the stiffest way of clamping a quill so i designed and built a different quilt clamp and mounted it to the milling machine and again picture show coming the new clamp arrangement started off with a large chunk of grey cast iron and i tree panned out the core because i found it wasteful to to bore out that much material in in this case i was left over with a nice chunk of cast iron that i can use for another part this is the tree panning tool i used it's a three millimeter wide cutting high speed steel tool i ground this long time ago for something completely different but it works nicely as a tree panning tool my graycast iron blank was too thick to tree pen out the core in one pass so i went from both sides and left about point two millimeters of material in the center and the rest was done with a hammer just beating out the slug in the middle turning the id to the exact size of the quill and the same setup i machined the face of the quilt clamp because this needs to be absolutely perpendicular to the bore changing out clamp from the inside and turning the od and the face this is a good example where the strap clamps on top of the vise jaws are very helpful i didn't want to use any fancy work hauling so i just put the part in the vise and i ever so slightly clamped it in the jaws of the wires then i used two hold down clamps to pull and pulled apart down onto the parallels this way this was a very secure setup and i'm using a saw blade to cut part of the clamping slit the flexure slit and also i drilled the mounting holes different setup now holding the part vertically to drill and tap the clamping screw hole and using a slitting saw to cut the clamping segment loose so it's actually able to flex under screw pressure our finished product the completed clamping assembly it's going to be bolted with five screws against the housing of the mill i used some o-ring stock in the slot of the flexure to prevent chips from making the way into there i don't want chips in there and then rubbing against the quill also if you look closely in the bore where the quill will ride i machined a groove a circular groove and there is a hole drilled to the outside and this hooks up to the one shot euler so the quill of this machine is now always lubricated via the one shot euler test fit against the quill i'm going to use now things get a little bit crazy of course i need a surface on the casting of the mill head where i can mount the newly designed clapping ring against because the original surfaces all are unmachined i had the option to take the head of the mill and either go to a larger manual mill a friend offered me to use his bridgeport clone which has a horizontal spindle but like any good self-respecting home shop machinist i decided to try it with an in-house solution first so i took a router motor this is a cress rautum router motor router motor with an er16 collet and i cobbled a holder together which consists of a steel plate that's held in the vise and a clamp that holds the router motor to the plate and that's standing vertically up so i can though the machine can cut itself the xy table moves the router motor back and forth and when i drop the head of the mill i have my c height adjustment here we have a close-up of most of the original boss that's formed on the underside of the casting already machined away i took a second pass and surface the larger area so i have a completely flat surface for my new clamping ring to bolt on against this was an absolutely awful process because the chips were more or less directly flying into the operator's face hence me but the dust extractor right at the end mill took care of a lot of the fine dust as you can see the end mill is sparking out from time to time that's because i'm running it way too fast i i choose to run the end mill at about eighteen thousand rpm it's four flute carbide end mill from guring roughing end mill it really did well but it wasn't pretty i took about the depth of cut off eight millimeters stepping over maybe point one or point two millimeter basically it's a manual adaptive clearing tool path then it was just a matter of transfer punching the holes from the clamping ring onto the casting of the mill rolling and tapping and bolting it against the housing it basically self-aligning because it's such a close fit on the quill itself here's a closer view of the clamping ring in place already with a kip schneiderspun heber a kip quick action handle and i have to say i'm very happy how this this climbing arrangement came out it works excellently it has a very positive clamping action it doesn't distort the quill sideways at all and it's also very very rigid 10 out of 10 would recommend so that's the coil clamp and machining away of the original casting that worked quite well then also i did scraping to the machine i didn't not really plan on doing scraping on this machine and but i was retrofitting a one-shot lubrication system and while i was doing that i was i i scraped the base the xy saddle and also the mounting surface for the y-bearing support and while i was there i also modified the y-bearing support and also the x-bearing support because i was not too happy about the two axial bearings and no radial bearing in there so that's another story here i didn't do a full scraping job on this milling machine i did the cross slide the saddle and the base the the the base of the machine the the main casting so here i'm working on the saddle checking it for parallelism and i can tell you that much it was off by a lot it was off by probably 70 micron [Music] or more from edge from corner to corner but in an assembled condition interestingly enough that didn't have much effect for some reason either twisted the remaining machine into alignment or something else i can't tell but i definitely scraped it parallel within 10 micron or less and also adjusted the angled surfaces of the dovetail this picture shows the original bearing surface on the underside of the cell which runs on the column casting and as you can see it's it's not it's not too crazy good after like 11 passes with the bias scraper it already looked way better very decent bearing surface and here's the second side only scrape for alignment not for bearing that's why the bluing is so so off but the numbers are in microns so we are from 0 to 10 microns over the whole length of the cell this will do for this machine and here is the finish script saddle with all the surfaces scraped for bearing deburred and ready to be installed back on the milling machine this is the first time in over six years that i take out the bearings from the x-axis screw and as you can see the crease has gotten dirty the bearings are not sealed and there is a tiny gap and dirt and dust will migrate into those axial bearings this is the y-axis screw of my mill this is the lead screw fairly nice acme thread we have two axial bearings the bearing shield and this holds it all together the way this assembles is this goes on here we have the the bearing shield this drops over the axle bearing on here and we have a second axle bearing and this part goes on here this all also holds the graduated ring the dial to give you your axis measurement and then this part goes on and it's cross pinned there is a roll pin through here and this works this is a fairly standard design two axle bearings radial is kinda carried by the id of the bearing block here i'm not a big fan of this design not at all because when you hand crank you put radial loads on the hand crank and while or an axle bearing can take a little bit of radial load too it's not ideal and the bore in here is too big to be a good radial bearing it has quite a bit of slop on here that's not too too nice so and the preloading uh is basically non-existent because it's a fixed setting by putting this on here and hammering a roll pins through there there is no preload on these bearings so what i decided to do i went on the internet and i ordered a double row angular contact bearing with a solid in a ring you can get these with with an with two with with a split in a ring so you can preload it or you buy these with which have a preset from the factory set axial play and these usually come out at about one to uh 10 microns in the size uh radial axial play and being a angular contact bearing they can carry a lot of side load and axial loads so this goes on here this these two will go away these axle bearings these have have spent their life these are six years old and they have seen a lot of hand cranking so this is a nice drop in replacement this goes on here we might have to give the shaft a little bit of uh diameter reduction just a little bit so this is a nice press fit on there we need to bore the the bearing shield here so this can drop in needs needs to be a nice sliding fit with a little bit with ever so slight proudness of the bearing bearing needs to be about maybe 0.02 millimeters uh above this flange surface so when you push it up against the casing and the casting of the machine which i scraped this holds it firmly in place and it doesn't move axially and then we put a spacer on here this goes on here hand wheel goes on with a little bit of um give it a little bit of gap then we put an axial screw on this which pulls everything against the inner ring of this dual row angular contact bearing and [Music] gives us a very good bearing situation for this piece here let's look at the new bearing station this it's only a round part of center line this is the screw the red thing in the center here is the screw and this thing here is the dual row angular contact bearing already seeing on the end on this little shaft piece here the green piece that's the the bearing shield the casting that we bore so it accepts the bearing this this color this is the casting of the mill like this green piece pushes the outer ring of the bearing against the casting clamps it in place firmly all good to go now all we need is um one more color we have our the black part is this black part here this goes on here and we need a spacer ring here so this part pushes up against the inner ring of this bearing and pushes the inner ring against the shoulder so this clamps the inner ring of the bearing against the shoulder of the screw then we just put in a screw from the end which holds the whole mess together so let's machine this casting here we'll put this on a magnetic chuck like this screw up the od here then reclamp it on here with the six jaw chuck and bore this out to a close fit for this bearing i stuck the part on the magnetic chuck and i dialed in the id of the bore using a small copper drift to knock it around and now we can take this cnmg lathe tool and true up the od of the part to run true to the id of the part it's probably already pretty good because it was machined but it's now painted and i don't know how good it's machined so we're going to do that [Music] [Music] that cleaned it up apart from the euler hole and the two rivet holes for the zero indicator on the of the dial i'm probably going to flip the part upside down so i don't see the two rivet holes and i'm going to turn a small plug to go in the hole of the oiler we don't need the oiler anymore or grease fitting in that case because the the bearing i'm putting in is lubricated for a lifetime i'm roughing out the majority of the material with this iscar combination insert drill and boring tool i'm using this because it has a very robust roughing insert on it compared to the large cnmg boring bar that i'm using now that has a finishing insert on it i do not want to remove a ton of material with this insert because it has a little bit more of a delicate cutting geometry and i don't want to to overdo it with it [Music] okay we're back at the bench uh we're going to assemble this thing everything's clean first we put the bearing in dual row angular contact and we take this thing around flip it 180 so you see a little bit more then we have our feed screw this goes into the idea of the bearing i'll take some force push it all the way down then we have a spacer this is just a piece of dom tubing parted and faced to length this goes all the way up to the inner ring of the bearing then i'm using one of the rings of the old axial bearing which is hard and parallel as a spacer plate this goes on here because uh this piece here is weirdly tapered and this bridges this so this piece goes on this rides up against the hard ring and the spacer bushing so this contacts in theory the inner ring of the bearing next step hand wheel and now when we look uh the end of the shaft is recessed behind the hand wheel when now we put on a washer which has a small recess board so it centers on here and a screw which is slightly too small on the head but it will do here and when we tighten the screw down we pull the hand wheel this piece here the spacer disc and the tube spacer up against the inner ring of the bearing and lock this whole thing to the bearing together with the feed screw the bearings itself is not secured in the casting yet it can move axially that will change once we mount this up against the casting of the mill and we forgot the the dial in here we don't really need the dial but it covers up most of this black piece which is not the prettiest part this search also has a fallback when the gas scales or the dro itself fails and i absolutely need to machine something now so and i have this fail back here this screws nice and this is way nicer than with the axle bearings before i'm working on the cross slide of the machine and also on on the cross slide feed screw here i'm checking the mounting surface where the bearing flange this mounts against up against this face but when i did some routine checks i noticed that the surface is not square uh in this direction or this direction to the y-axis travel means that this uh far away the screw goes from the bearing section the more it bends the screw which is bad leads to uneven wear of the of the knot and an uneven hand cranking experience and it feels like it cranks harder the farther you go away from the bearing or depending on the alignment it gets harder when you crank towards it so we don't want that so i'm scraping the surface square and parallel to the travel of the machine and this is the way i'm i'm checking for alignment i have a more one two three block which is decent enough in squareness and straightness and parallelism and i bolted it up against this face with a single screw and i have an indicator set on my cross slide and i can use this to check if if this face is aligned in this direction then i can re-orient like this onto the top side of the of this block and do the same test again and i'm within i'm pretty close already this is a close-up here is the the block that's bolted up against this face and i'm writing the indicator back and forth on the surface this gives me a pretty good indication of what i'm what's happening and allows me to to scrape the surface so it's true in both directions to travel the scraping print is still very awful but i wanted to show you something else this whole surface here on the front of the machine is one surface that has been face milled but i'm only scraping the small section so i took a die grinder and i cut a like relief groove with a ball ball burr so i'm only scraping the surface i'm going to retouch the color to paint on the front face here later once i'm done with scraping but this relief allows me to scrape only this and leave this untouched what i have on here are two vices one is gerardi and one is a whole x and they're basically the same wise just different branding not sure who came first not sure who makes them originally two wise is worth 120 millimeter wide jaws i surface ground the jaws on this one to be smooth and this one still has its v-grooves which don't do much but uh since they're ground very nicely these grooves can can be used as as an as an aid for holding small diameter around stock not that i need that very often but it's an option so i'm not grinding it away they're aligned on the back jaw to be parallel and in line and yeah that's what i use on the wise one note on the wise handle originally comes with with an l shaped handle like like you would use to change a tire on a car if you have an uh a blown out tower on the autobahn i bought this this is one of those swivel head wrenches with 19 millimeters 17 on the other side removed it don't need it and that's very useful because you can use it like this like a speed handle or you can use it like this to to put some torque on it these wires have a corset just you use an allen wrench here and you have a corsa chest here you have a steel ball in here let's get that gets pressed by these two set screws down into these counters countersinks in the base and we should keep clear of chips of course and at the end of this screw just goes in this keyhole here that's how you move how you quickly adjust the the moving jaw then you have about maybe 60 millimeters of travel that you can actually use this design has another benefit you can remove the jaw very quickly and for example if you have a large plate you can just span it across devices without having to remove devices just put two larger parallels back here put the large plate on here use two strap clamps out here holding it apart without removing devices or you use a large t-nut that you can slide in here then you can use a rather irregular hold down hardware in here with a stud and a strut clamp to hold parts directly on the bed of the vice if you don't want to remove the wire these vices have a set of threads here in the [Music] moving and the fixed jaw and those are plugged with some set screws and when you get rid of these you can put a stud in here this is all antenna extra i i specifically bought a number of m10 hardware clamping hardware for this purpose and you can use a strap clamp here to give additional hold down strength on a park part you're working on for example when you cannot put much side load on the part because it's very thin you can add a little bit of down pressure to keep it secured and i have of course the spherical washers and the spherical ended nuts i don't buy the the sets of clamping hardware i buy individual pieces they are not very expensive and good quality but very much worth it so let me put this on here put a little bit of of backing material under here so this track cam is nice and horizontal then you have your hold down in front here or you can use this as a y stop for example many ways to use these threads just keep them covered up with a set screw so you that don't get all sorts of chips in them and since i have the ys0 on the milling machine and i tried not to remove them the only case where i need to remove them is when i use the large more rotary table but i use that thing maybe once a year and then it's okay to remove devices i put devices on with some wax up between devices and the table some lps3 rust preventive so i don't get any surprises on the device and as i said i try to keep all my additional tooling set up in a way so i can just drop it in devices i have some pictures here this is a very common example this is a 5c indexer similar to the one that harding made and i milled two flats on the side of the body as many people do and this allows this indexer just to drop in device and be ready to use within seconds small hundred and fifty millimeter magnetic chuck also drops out of the box into device it's small enough this is the back side of the magnetic chuck with a one two three block bolted to it or the metric equivalent in this case and this allows the magnetic track to be held at weird angles or bolted to other pieces and then held and vice or something else just as a little side note and be careful when drilling into a magnetic truck there are parts on the inside of the truck that move either be very careful or take it apart also very careful there are some things that you have to consider when you take a magnetic chuck apart tom lip did a video on that topic and yeah don't make make me responsible if you ruin your magnetic chuck this is another example this is my adjustable angle table also drops in the vice very quick this is a no-brainer i learned this from robin renzetti the flange that mounts the sixth jaw chuck to the lathe has two flats milled and ground onto it so you can drop it right away into the mill wise and preferably in one setup you can turn your part and then transfer it over to the mill an example of a part being bolted directly to the bed of the vice with the large t-nut i showed you and this is just a quick way to to clamp stuff down without having to move the wires another side note i i prefer a vise that has square sides and where the jaws are not proud of device body itself so you can bolt a one two three block to the side of the wise and that's automatically square then means you can use it to square up parts and here's the example what you do when you have to clamp down a large piece of plate stock you just clamp it over the vice stack up some blocks drop your stock onto it and then you strap clamps not shown in this picture to hold it down no need to remove device one quick word about my wi-stop it's back here let's remove it i like my y stops as sturdy as possible i don't like the 3d multi-adjustable vise stops those are in my mind terrible i have a spacer screwed into the side of the device with an m6 thread here and the other side is i think m10 doesn't really matter and then i have a very simple stop just a piece of flat bar with a long slot for the m6 screw that holds it to the side of the vice 6h7 reamed hole in front here a pinch screw here this pulls this section together and i slot it using like on a shaper just on the milling machine use the slotting cutter to to slot it from here to here to give it some meat to pinch on this pin this is a a high speed steel punch this is a standard part from tone die and i ground a spherical end on it on the d-bit grinder because with a vise stop usually you want point contact so you you have a very defined stop a large contact-wise stop can be useful but not always so this goes in here and the stupid scale and this with very little torque pinches this pin very securely and with a heavy washer it just bolts to the side of the vice it's really nothing special it has some range of adjustment like in and out because i cut a slot in here i can move it up and down depending on how my parallels and my work is is set up i also have different pins for this i have a large elephant foot stop here i need this in some cases when i roll something round up against it just have more chance of hitting it and i have also this here this is a blade stop it's just a piece of one millimeter spring steel silver solder into the end of a piece of six millimeter drill rod and i use this in here in device when i when i'm holding very small work and can't get in a six millimeter pin so that's the vice stop really nothing special about it it's a simple design personally i like the the pinch slot here that's not going to the outside because it looks neat but that's it you could also just slot it through with a slitting saw from the front but i think this is nicer and when i don't use it i just swing it to the back and it's out of the way one important thing in my mind is how you hold down your vice on your milling machine table and this was how this is what has proven to be one of the more desirable ways of doing so this is a clamp that runs the entire width of the table minus a few millimeters on both ends like 15 and this gives a lot of rigidity to to device itself and the way this works is it it sits out here it has clearance all the way from here to here and it hooks into the groove of the vice up here and the screw is moved as close as possible towards the vice because that way the force of the screw is primarily holding down the wires and not getting pressed onto the middle table you want to hold the wires not the clamp onto the table and as i said we do this on all the vmcs at work on on the large cnc milling machines and also on our manual milling machines this has really proven to be very secure very rigid and very very safe also it's easy to clean because there are not 5 000 little nooks and crannies where chips can collect between the two vices i have a combined strap clamp which holds both both vices at the same time and pulls them down in the center again with m6 screw and what i really wanted to show you i have some some foam some packaging foam jammed in here just to keep chips and dirt and gunk out this is very good idea makes it really really easy to clean yeah yeah don't use compressed air to clean your machine's fixtures or tooling so i hope this cleared up some things about this milling machine it's still the basic asian import rf45 style milling machine like everybody sells them but it has a bit of uh it has a little bit of modification i'm still not getting rid of it it it works just fine it does what i need i have a ton of tooling for it so that's it that's the rf-45 or optimum mb4 milling machine thank you all for watching thanks for the ongoing support and i'll be back you

Channel: Stefan Gotteswinter

Views: 30,212

Rating: 4.9755244 out of 5

Keywords: optimum mb4, opti mb4, rf45, f45, fräsmaschine, optimum, milling machine, clamping ring, kress, fräsmotor, gerardi, holex

Id: OSjLhEWY1Vg

Length: 43min 17sec (2597 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021