Rodney Restoration : The Great Myford Milling Attachment

[Music] if only my lathe was a milling machine rodney in a world of myford attachments there is one that towers above rodney i'm guessing it was invented by a guy called rodney this is very exciting i've never done a rodney before [Music] [Music] let's start with this cog thing this doesn't live here this has just been jammed in the spindle for the sake of shipping this is what sticks out of the lathe and into the back side of rodney i don't have a service manual or any other info on how these come apart so we're just going to start detaching stuff and hopefully figure it out i'm guessing based on this gasket that we're dealing with an oil filled gearbox [Laughter] i've removed the obvious set screws and nothing seems to be moving oh this is a bit manky which is why the cog thing was a little hard to get off a serrated set screw is not the best now i have movement but it doesn't seem to be helping i expected the shaft to push out through the gear at this point and then i noticed this little bugger a sneaky tapered pin i'm assuming it's a tapered pin anyway i can't tell which end is the small end and it doesn't want to move easily it looks a little bit beat up so i filed what i think is the small end down flush and this is when i realized something interesting even filed down flush i can see the pin is pinned into the gear i think someone has intentionally beaten both ends of the pin so it'll never come out [Music] so my plan is to drill away the top of the pin and a little bit of the gear [Music] don't do this to a guy okay so now the shaft is moving but i don't want to push this mess through the bearing so that needs to be dealt with and now finally this was hours of real time this shaft comes out now you can see the other bevel gear i unscrewed the little cap screw you know hopefully but the gear didn't just fall off so i guess the shaft needs to come out first so let's do that by first taking off this pulley now the bolts connecting the castings are exposed and if you're following along at home it would be a little less cumbersome to separate the castings first and then drive the vertical shaft out but it only took a few light taps with the leather shaft remover tool so no big deal in my case and now you can see the set screw securing the second bevel gear there's no way to access this in place now the business end of the machine as much fun as it is to play with rodney's floppy parts i'm going to ignore them for now and take on the big bit the quill the quill handle has a little set screw in it to hold the lever in mid position which is unnecessary in this case because the lever is rusted in place this fancy looking bronze gear is held in place with a roll pin which didn't put up too much of a fight and of course the gear didn't just slide off and now i have access to remove this odd looking lever system i think it's a pretty simple mechanism but i'll probably have to play with it a bit to figure out exactly how everything works together and this knobbly casting hanging in the middle is the most unusual part because it's kind of floating and it makes accessing the nut for the vertical slide a real pain we're not quite done with dismantling yet removing this drive dog wheel thing gives access to another bearing this bearing is super tight both around the aluminium boss and inside the pulley i have no idea why the last piece of the puzzle to pull apart is the spindle and as you can see the bearings are completely rogered the only forum post i could find online about dismantling a rodney was from a guy asking for help because he couldn't get the spindle apart so i'm expecting a fight okay so there's the inside of the spindle someone has replaced all of the other easy to access bearings in the past but i suspect the spindle bearings are original the spindle came out of the quill no problem and likewise the bottom bearing came off the spindle with just a few light taps as you can see the second bearing came out even easier well most of it and now i have a problem the outside race is stuck inside the quilt and it sits in a recess which leaves nothing to press against [Music] if i can't get the bearing race out this machine is effectively scrapped it took me a while i tried several different pokey things but eventually found that this screwdriver was just the right shape to catch the edge of the bearing race and it came out pretty easily once i could give it a whack [Music] rodney now it's time for paint starting with each primer [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] now the plastic lid needs to be treated differently first of all i didn't use paint stripper in case it melts this plastic i'll sand the paint off instead and secondly i noticed this old repair it feels pretty good but i'm going to add epoxy to both sides anyway i'd rather know for sure that it's strong enough that it doesn't crack after the painting is done so i'm grooving out roughly about one quarter of the depth from each side and filling that with epoxy and the bare plastic part is coated with some plastic primer which brings it to the same point as everything else now it's primer time i'm going to cover everything in a couple of coats of this epoxy primer i sprayed the parts outside there were people around so i didn't feel like setting up a camera but here's the end result you can see i'm sanding through a guide coat and filling any small imperfections with 3m spot putty and that is the last step before final paint now these rodney's were originally painted with a silverish colour i say ish because it was silver with a hint of cow i'm going with a different colour called myford so join me out in the paint booth and prepare for some unnecessarily epic [Music] painting [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] okay look i have excuses i have a minigun but it has been driving me crazy with a leaking air seal so i used a full size gun for this instead which is like watering fancy letters with a fire hose i'm shooting half trigger at the most except i distinctly it doesn't matter i might be able to fix it [Music] primer oh well it could do with another coat okay time for some machining this is part of the lever assembly look at it this threaded part has obviously been made by a guy and this there's no way this has worn out to this extent i have to assume it was machined like this by a woodworker you know the guys who chop down trees anyway how or why is not important to the lathe [Applause] [Music] now that was 16 threads per inch the small end is 18 which means suffering through changing a bunch of gears if only i had a quick change gearbox and here we are final assembly rodney pardon rodney what rodney all right the sticker yeah the rodney sticker looks stupid i wasn't going to bother all right calm down this is the old sticker as you can see rodney didn't put much effort into logo design and it's crooked but look at this image from the internet these rodney's were expensive but the guy who cut the sticker out sure didn't care anyway i have a plan i paid a man to print me a water slide decal instead of black stripes i've gone with white stripes and clear gaps now the printing isn't spectacular well pretty good if he was using a dosh matrix printer from 1995 also there are a couple of defects but let's stick one on and see how it looks i have two copies so i can afford to mess one up now i'm no decal expert but i'm starting to get suspicious that something's wrong here the background is white the guy printed on white decal paper instead of clear how do you mess this up when printing decals is the thing you do ah well you can't trust those random guys you find on the internet now this wasn't the first method i attempted for the logo it's been a drawn out saga at this point i'm over it done no logo it looks good without one rodney rodney rodney rodney rodney so i've been thinking i've been thinking about how many of you are going to comment insufferably about there being no rodney logo if i don't do the rodney logo i guess let's try again i'm really hoping the masking tape comes off cleanly [Music] don't panic it looks fine from a distance i'm kidding this isn't unexpected i'll do a bit of tidying up with a brush and a razor blade not bad now for the rodney i'm using a rodney decal that i printed myself why didn't you do that in the first place i hear you ask well i needed white on clear and my printer doesn't print white now a decal isn't going to last five minutes in a workshop so i buried it all under four coats of [Applause] clear and i think it looks great a little handcrafted around the edges perhaps but overall i think it's pretty good okay it's time to put rodney back together starting with the spindle this is a basic spindle with two bearings held apart by the quill in this case there are angular contact bearings nothing fancy but good old rodney decided to use imperial sized bearings in the spindle so they were expensive like 160 dollars each the spindle was designed so that oil could be dripped in through a hole in the top cap to lubricate the bearings i'm not going to do that i'm going to use grease instead this grease is a little bit fancy but i want it to last a long time i'm using this bar of steel as a hot plate to put some heat into the bearings and of course that only half worked in the chaos i didn't push record but this is how i gently tapped the bearing the rest of the way home using the flat side of the yankee and now the quill goes on the quill is a pretty easy fit and the second bearing isn't going to just slide on because of course it has to go into the quill and over the spindle at the same time and i'm going to plug this little oil hole i reckon junk sneaking in through that hole is probably what trashed the old bearings so that little collar tightens the pair of bearings it pushes the inside races closer together while the outside races are held a set distance apart by the quill at the moment you can see there's a bunch of play in the bearings so i tightened the collar until i couldn't feel any end float and now checking with the indicator you can see there's still a couple of thousands of an inch end float so at this point a couple more taps to get rid of that last little bit and making sure the spindle still spins freely all right i'm a long way in to find out if i've bought a piece of junk or not but let's see oh three powers quite a bit even at the end of a test bar i could give the test bar a tap to make sure it's seated properly but if there is a burr or swarf or whatever causing this run out i don't want to transfer that damage to my test bar so let's take a direct reading off the spindle first and see if the spindle itself is running true wow okay that's surprisingly good i know i could be using a test indicator with a finer resolution but still that needle is barely moving let's recheck the taper with a dead center excellent apart from a couple of rough patches on the center that needle looks pretty still awesome i need to replace this buggered pin i don't know what size pin this is but i'm going for a number zero which is slightly larger leaving me room to ring the hole out now these are imperial sized pins i don't know why but they're still the most common pins here this damn hole took me quite a while because there were errors ordering the correct reamer you don't just order a number zero reamer to go with a number zero pin oh no there is a nominal fractional size that goes with the pin as well which you obviously have to cross reference on a chart in the machinery's handbook and now you know how many fractions of an inch the small end of a zero pin is luckily the reamers are some fraction of an inch measured at the big end but hey it's just a 1 in 48 taper so cross reference that on page 77 000 of the machinery's handbook and boom i ordered the wrong sized reamer [Music] do [Music] the big end still needs to be cut down a little but i do like to leave my taper pins sticking out on both sides this is the vertical shaft which holds the other bevel gear as you can see it's only held on with the set screw i think the other type of pin was a user modification and i'm going to do the same here [Music] okay i think that's the last fix we have to make so let's put this thing back together and see how it works it basically goes back together how it came apart it's not complicated but just in case you're the other guy in the world putting a rodney back together i did make things harder than they needed to be here for example there was really no point pushing the shaft in before the bearing retainer plate was attached [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the seat screw is doing nothing now you don't need to point that out but i figure well it may as well live here instead of the bottomless jar of screws i'll never use again but keep for some reason i'm not filling this thing with oil that just sounds like a messy nightmare i'm going to try this fancy grease on the gears and see how it lasts the alternative would be to bury the gears in a big glob of normal grease which would also work fine [Music] [Music] [Music] so a tip for that one other rodney reassembler out there there was really no need to put the big pieces together before the very end i sort of thought it would build up better in the video that way but it just made things more cumbersome [Music] so that's the spindle and quill part of the machine assembled and it seems to work as it should but this lever mechanism feels really awkward like it's bound up and i noticed that this main locking nut isn't sitting flat so that probably means the bolt which is also the axle for the fine adjust mechanism isn't straight for some reason and i think we can do better so off it comes i suspect this plate is the culprit it's probably bent from over tightening okay so how this works the two levers are unrelated this one locks the quill just like a drill press this lever locks the fine adjust mechanism engaged or disengaged and facing off the front of that plate made all the difference it's now nice and smooth now i didn't really like the way this pulley was going on so i pushed it on all of the way i remember when i pulled this off it was a nice sliding fit oh and i forgot the spacer so off it comes and after a little fiddling i got it to drop back on nicely the bearing inside this other pulley is really tight and it's even tighter going over the aluminium boss on the head casting i forgot that i had to use heat to get it off i've got a block under here to support the head casting and i'm being very gentle with the hammer but this would have been 10 times easier and faster if i took the head casting off and set it flat on the bench like i said i forgot how tight the bearing was coming off so i kept expecting it to get to that point where it just dropped the rest of the way nice and easy anyway it worked out fine but now i had a real challenge on my hands holy moly this belt is tight this new belt has the same size designation as the old belt but the old one is slightly longer so i quickly switched to that but still there was just no way you see if i put the belt on the big pulley first i have to stretch it over this large edge on the small pulley which is really hard the better option is to stretch the belt over the large pulley but that's not possible because the pulley is right against the casting where these protrusions are the protrusions are for an older version of rodney that had six bolts around the outside to hold the lid on in this case they're unnecessary so i made clearance wow oh the little brass screws snug the rodney up against the lathe bed and these two are redundant oil fill and drain plugs [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] enough panning shots already we've got a rodney to run [Music] this thing is damned heavy i'm sure you can expect a damaged beard every time you mount rodney okay make sure we're in slow speed yep three two one nice let's try maximum [Music] good everything seems okay so let's stop messing about let's make some chips i splashed out on a few morse taper collets these things are hard to get i had to order metric ones from the uk if anyone in new zealand has any unwanted mt2 collets floating around please get in touch rodney's spindle nose is the same as the mifids so in theory you could mount any myford sized chuck on here engage fine feed so i've no idea how much i'm feeding down here let's go oh that's almost nothing talk about an anti-climax more aggression required yes look at it um mistakes were made so it turns out that that first cut was about two millimeters deep and i didn't have the saddle lock down very well ah so it turns out i didn't really have the vice tightened so that was about a third of a millimeter or say 15 000 and that was easy let's try something more challenging the slot is almost a millimeter deep i mean it's no bridge port but compared to using a vertical milling attachment on a lathe this is pretty good well isn't that cute how about some power feed action oh yeah that's a two millimeter deep cut by the way [Applause] all right i think that's about it final thoughts after a brief play what do i think about rodney you're much better off putting your money towards a cheap benchtop milling machine okay okay hear me out a rodney is worth a fair chunk of coin i think its value as a rare myford collectible probably exceeds its actual value as a milling machine so if you just want to make parts any old wrong foo is going to run roughshod over rodney but maybe you are the cashed up mifid enthusiast well compared to a vertical milling attachment a rodney is more capable and much more fun to use because everything is laid out flat so there we are thank you all for watching you'll certainly see rodney in future videos i hope this was fun and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Geoffrey Croker

Views: 261,074

Rating: 4.9069538 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 1UnP8Vr3d_Q

Length: 40min 17sec (2417 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/veektohr]

Geoff Croker is the reason my bandsaw has been in a thousand little pieces in my shop for over a year.

[u/mchalky]

Awesome restoration