Saving an unusual milling machine from the scrapyard.

how's it going what's up so yeah pretty much all this tan color stuff and this blue thing is gotcha figure out when the boss gets here what do you want to do yeah so what do y'all make uh we do a whole uh kind of a variety of things a lot of tools for like uh telecommunications like underground power all right awesome great lines of live clearance for like overhead utilities and stuff like okay pole saws and printers some military lighting cool cool kind of personal outfit so this this was a scissor Department making like splicer scissors for back with like landline copper lines problems and stuff okay it's kind of fiber now and our Snips and stuff wouldn't really cut the fiber so kind of died out [Music] thank you you'll have to come off and go littering the highway come down some more just tiny bits what are you gonna Gadget with yeah that's a good question as soon as I did that I thought what am I just get out of the way here let me hold the brake on let's just push the forward starting to go running off [Music] nobody wants them yeah I can't leave you this side of the trailer oh where are you going she's leaving [Music] [Music] thank you foreign so my buddy who hauls scrap all the time asked me to help him on a job he had which I did and as a thank you he offered me one of these Milling machines so I thought I'd just uh show them both to you because they're pretty interesting I think this is a Cincinnati ought eight or zero eight plain automatic milling machine that's what they call it so it's similar to a like a general purpose or a tool room horizontal milling machine at the back here you can see the uh this motor drives the spindle through this stepped v-belt Arrangement and you can either Drive the spindle directly or it also has back gears that you can shift it into for extra gear reduction and then it has another motor tucked away behind this housing on this side which Powers the table I'm not exactly sure how it works but it's something to do with there is a mechanical linkage which drives a lead screw like you would find on virtually any other milling machine and it is connected and disconnected to the motor via some kind of hydraulically controlled clutches and then the feed rate is controlled by what they call pickoff gears but you're behind this cover right here so if you want to change the the feed rate you just take these gears off like that and swap them around you can swap them side to side and then there's all sorts of different different sizes you can get to uh to change how fast the table moves and then to control the table travel there is this sort of Clockwork cam mechanism behind this cover I am not sure how that works it somehow or another controls the clutches really couldn't tell you any more about it unfortunately but I've got it plugged into this variable frequency device because of course it's three phase let's see here run uh if you try to just cut it on with the switch and pull that coil in to start the motor it will give you an error message for over current I think is what it is on the vfd every time so I'm just going to kick it in with my foot here and that turns the spindle motor on there may just be something wrong with that coil I don't know because you can turn the table motor on Via the switch over here to do that maybe you can't um oh I know what the problem is there is actually a safety on this back cover uh right there this has to be closed for it to work cycle yeah there it goes [Music] so you can see these uh table feed gears running so yeah a very neat machine unfortunately it is just hopelessly obsolete but that leads me into this other machine this is a sun strand single ought rigid Mill also a horizontal Auto cycling production Mill the spindle on this machine is driven by this motor down here has a chain drive up to a shaft that goes into this uh gearbox or whatever you would call it and there are some some pick-off gears behind this cover that you can change the spindle speed with and then a shaft that comes out to the spindle to drive up there the table on this machine is controlled completely hydraulically so you have this large motor underneath the table here and it Powers two hydraulic pumps you can vary the displacement manually by turning this square head shaft here which will also rotate this dial that is supposed to give you an idea of how many inches per minute the table is going to travel and then the fluid from those pumps through some convoluted valving and piping gets pumped into a hydraulic cylinder that sits directly beneath the table there and that actually pulls the table to and fro so you can kind of see this valve here which we broke the handle off while moving it unfortunately it says stop feed and rapid and when you move it it has this mechanism here and then these things that clamp onto the table that I guess control it not exactly sure how it works but that's the general idea all right I've got this one plugged in let's see what happens if we try to turn it on uh stop start Maybe you know what I bet it's turning the wrong way hit reverse after that foreign okay I think uh what's keeping the table from moving is uh you probably can't even see it in there but there is a little plunger that's supposed to be popped out and then whenever I move the table the first time this angled bar here moved in and pushed it in and then it didn't pop back out so it's stuck in there and then there was an identical one on this side that was popped out and then I pushed it in because that's what you do when you troubleshoot something you know nothing about I guess and now that one is also stuck in its bore so I tried hammering on it a little bit um that did nothing so I think this valve block is going to have to be disassembled to get those out and get them cleaned up and moving freely again I do uh not really have any time to be working on this right now so I am just going to find a nice corner to stick it in and revisit it at a later date this one unfortunately is going to the scrap yard the last shop that actually used them tried to sell them and nobody wanted them the most important factor that went into the decision of which of these two machines to keep was the fact that I will probably end up doing nothing with it other than taking it to the scrap yard myself and this one weighs about 500 pounds more than that one so yeah I will uh update this later it's a few months later and this thing has not fixed itself so I'm going to try to take this cover off and see if I can get access to maybe free those plungers up okay that might be the back of those plungers right there try tapping that forward I really want to fix the handle before I put that cover back on and the only way I can think of to do it is to kind of just drill this hole a little bit deeper and tap some more threads into it to thread the handle into [Applause] I just drilled that deeper and tapped it I think that'll be fine as long as nobody crashes into it with a forklift again it should be all right all right this plunger I'm just going to see if it'll work anyway only the rapid feed is working for some reason I just adjusted this thing down here that controls the table feed rate and I think now it's working right oh cool all right Rapids Cuts rapid return foreign foreign a little more just to make sure that the table would go through its entire length of travel and it does so yeah awesome love it when it's an easy fix like that I went ahead and moved it outside so that I could pressure wash it now normally I would never condone pressure washing a machine tool but in this particular instance I think it is Justified mostly just because of how insanely dirty this thing is also I really don't think it's going to hurt it the table is all hydraulically controlled there's no gears or bearings or anything in there that are going to get damaged if they get wet the spindle drive has a bunch of gears and bearings in it but it's sealed up pretty good so I don't think it's going to get much if any water in it and either way if it does I'm going to take it right back in and run it for a while to flush everything out also someone painted over the ways so you don't have to worry about those rusting if you listen carefully the first time that I ever cycled the table you can hear a loud pop and I'm pretty sure that was actually this piece of cast iron breaking off of this cover back here because there were so many chips jammed up behind it that it couldn't push them out of the way and it just snap that chunk off I think when you're to the point that the machine is so dirty that there are pieces breaking off of it you're pretty much justified in cleaning it by whatever means necessary this is going poorly pretty much every working surface on the machine here is Caked Up with what I can only describe as chip mortar I guess it's just tons and tons of ancient chips that have settled in there and rusted and locked together and they're pretty much the consistency of asphalt I mean even the air hammer [Music] kinda can get them out but that's what I'm having to do and they were all in the t-slots in this drain down under here going that way towards the coolant return I've got it pretty well dried off and back in here so let's see if it still works fun I can't get the quill to go in and out it's supposed to have like a like an inch and three quarters of travel on it and it won't move for some reason so this is the lock for it and it's free um and then this is to adjust it and it's also free it won't move so I took the bolts out of this cover or whatever this is and I'm gonna try and take that off and see what I can see I think it might come off if I just do this yeah there we go wow that looks fun I don't think there's anything wrong with that after much hammering and swearing I finally got the quill out as far as it goes what I ended up doing was first knocking it in a little bit and then I guess that got it loose enough to wear by heating up the casting around it I was able to force it out with the adjuster I'm just going to take some steel wool and see if I can clean it up and get it to move freely I messed with it a little bit but I couldn't really get it much Freer it does move but you have to really Reef on that adjuster thing so I decided that the quill needs to come all the way out so I can clean it up properly along with the bore it rides in so I took this nut off the back of the spindle here that was a huge pain in the butt because as you can see it's all goobered up from people hitting it with a chisel over the years and the threads were kind of messed up so it was super tight but I did eventually get it off which made room for this big gear to slide back on the spindle so I pushed it as far out as I could with the quill adjuster and then I tried everything else I could think of with the tools I have had to knock it out the rest of the way but despite all my prying and hammering and heating and swearing it didn't want to budge so I broke down and bought one of these little 10 ton port-a-power Rams and I think that is going to be just the ticket the fitting that came with the ram was a different size than the fitting that was on the hose I had so I had to resort to some very janky Plumbing that hopefully will not explode under the pressure I'm about to subject it to foreign oh yeah oh foreign [Music] foreign the good news is the quill is out the bad news is this came with it and I don't think it was supposed to so I guess this is part of a pin that is meant to keep the quill from rotating in the housing which in hindsight makes perfect sense because like I said the Quill's supposed to just float in there so if you don't have the quill lock tight then it could try to spin I guess anyway that pin was there and I didn't know and I pressed right through it so hopefully you can kind of see up in there it sheared off and gouged a big track through the top of the quill board there unfortunately in hindsight what you are supposed to do is Slide the overarm out and then you can pull that pin up out of that hole right there so that really sucks I feel pretty stupid but I actually don't think that's the end of the world I think I can clean everything up and might even be able to just clean up the end of this pin and reuse it and I think I can just kind of gently file off the Burrs inside the bore there and it should still be usable should confess at one point I did hear kind of an ominous cracking noise and I did stop and check a few things but I didn't see anything obviously wrong so I just kind of ignored it and kept going which obviously I shouldn't have done and I got it pretty well cleaned up see there just used a Dremel tool with a Scotch Brite pad on the end of it for the bulk of it there were a couple of raised spots that I actually used a sanding disc to kind of grind back down like right here where I was pushing on it and right here where that pin broke I tried to go a little bit lighter on the board because it's it's probably a little softer being cast iron I just smooth that gouge out as best I could I also went and got a new nut for the spindle local bearing Place had it for five dollars so that was kind of a no-brainer all right foreign basically back together but I'm not sure if the bearings in the spindle are set exactly right so I'm just going to try running it a little bit and see what happens this is the only cutter I have that fits this thing so I'm just going to see what it'll do to this piece of scrap steel foreign [Music] thank you I guess you could call that a cut or maybe just a gouge the only cutter I've got for this thing is this weird form tool that I think they were using to cut serrations into scissor blades with and I'm sure it's quite dull and I have no means of sharpening it so that's about as good as I'm going to be able to do right now when I got this thing I kind of thought a use for it would eventually materialize and it kind of hasn't I guess the problem is it just can't really do the same things that a normal milling machine can do for instance you can't cut on the z-axis because there isn't a tapered give in either of the ways to keep them snug while you move the head up and down now you can cut a little bit on the y-axis by moving the spindle in and out but you only have an inch and three quarters of travel on that and it's really clumsy to do I guess you could probably improve that by making some sort of dedicated handle for it but it's still not going to be as good as just a regular Mill would be and of course you can cut all you want along the x-axis but really only if you want to cut all the way through something there isn't really a provision to stop the table in an exact spot without fiddling with these little trip things here A whole lot so while it is a really cool piece of Machinery I just don't have enough use for it to justify the floor space it takes up so I think I'm going to try to sell it and hopefully someone else needs it more than I do something interesting that I neglected to show before is this so-called phase converter that I whipped up to power this thing this is actually nothing more than a three-phase electric motor there are a lot of good videos on here about exactly how these work so I won't try to Fumble through explaining something that I don't fully understand anyway but suffice to say it is extremely simple to make one of these work it was actually easier to wire this up and make it function than it was to make that variable frequency device work and in fact I did this because I already had the motor and I didn't want to spend 200 on a variable frequency device for this Mill that is probably worth about 200 and also because it's not a best practice to run old electric motors on a variable frequency device like that it's something to do with the waveform of the alternating current that an inverter like that puts out that tends to cause more vibration in the windings and that can be especially harsh on older Motors that may have a degraded insulation on their windings and weren't really designed for that sort of power in the first place but anyway I think the most complicated part about making one of these work is getting it started there's a lot of ways to do that some more complicated than others I chose to Simply wrap a strap around the shaft of the motor and if I give it a yank to get the motor up to speed like this and then cut the single phase power on before it winds down it'll run just fine as it spins around it automatically generates the other two phases that are needed to power the mill but yeah I just wanted to show you that in case you were thinking of making one yourself you absolutely should because it's the easiest thing in the world and I honestly can't believe I've never done it before now foreign [Applause] that worked out well I sold it to those guys for 300 they said they did have a specific use in mind for it not exactly sure what it was but they mentioned something about some parts that they need to make every once in a while and they were looking for a mill just like that to make them with so I think it went to a good home which is cool all things considered it was probably not really worth the time and effort I put into it I think if I had taken to the scrap yard they probably would have given me about 200 for it but it just seemed like too much of a waste to scrap something that was still functional like that and in any case I just thought it was a really interesting thing to mess with and I hope you did too thanks for watching

Channel: AlwaysBored

Views: 12,278

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Id: CembAY36Ivw

Length: 31min 53sec (1913 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023