Tramming a milling machine with epoxy

Hey welcome back to a shop remember when I did the video about my RF 45 clone milling machine I told you that I shamed the column into place and for those of you that have a mill similar like this with a cross-table and a vertical column with a head on it moving up and down you all know the problem that you have to tram in the column so the head moves square up and down to the table normally you do this by shimming or you scrape the mating surfaces which isn't pain because you have to take off this whole head from the column and also the column of the base to do the scraping and that's early a lot of work and back then and with you I told you that I'm going to do it another way what I'm going to use a some machine epoxy this is specialized adjusting epoxy for machine tools this is used on big ass machines like big gantry mills or big lace and ands on and Zanger big machine parts are aligned to each other they use jack screws and shims to bring everything in position then they mix up this epoxy and inject it between the mating surfaces and this material builds a perfect surface where both parts can rest on then you get a perfectly sound connection because if you have machine parts and they mate to each other that's source for instability the worst thing you can do is having to build surfaces on to each other ground and ground surface is better very good scrape done scraped because it has a large contact area even batter is scraped and scraped with some heavy oil between the oil helps to dampen vibrations and what what is even better is if you have an epoxy in between which casts onto both surfaces and that's what we're going to do to my milling machine I already loosen the screws of the column and lift at the column and I'm going to show you how I did this without taking the whole machine apart okay as you can see I support that the machines head with some wood down here nicely stacked perfectly safe then I loosened the four screws down here m16 cap head screws and then I just lowered the head of the milling machine and that pulled the column of the base I didn't remove the screws completely covered in one the column to give it a to slip off to off the machines base that would be a disaster and I had to put in a wooden wedge thumpy from the backside so d so the column lifted only otherwise it would have gone up this way same on this side as you can see I have a gap of about five mil millon and that should be enough here you can see one of the old shims this is some some shim stock that I used to trim in the mill but that's the worst possible choice by doing this you reduce the effective surface of this mounting flange through to this surface let's talk for a second about this epoxy it's of course a two-part system you have your resin that's still filled yeah it's covered of course and this is the hardener shouldn't drink this you might swallow a exclamation mark a fish might drown or something awful might happen the system already comes in the right ratio you mix the whole hardener with the whole resin to get your mixing mixing ratio right or you can use a accurate scale to weigh it out because a lot of people will ask what this stuff is it's made by Dimond and it's a justing compound for machine building what's the technical data sheet the stuff is still filled as you can see it's magnetic there is an awful lot narrower small steel balls in it and the steel balls are quite hard I would say they are hard because you cannot machine this stuff when it's harmed not really ruins every cutter and as you can see they use it on big-ass gantry milling machines on some alien technology and over here you have some more examples of that stuff in use when you go to the website I will put the link down in the description and you will find a lot more examples and I think there is also the technical data sheet for download in English and yeah I'm not representing this company in any way and not affiliated with them but I'm a firm belief in their products they all everything that I used from them so far worked right well and I never had a problem with it and that's German Gumby boobs so yeah that's an abundant paper rose resin is not really liquid but it will run away through every small gap over time this takes about 24 hours to fully Harden so to prevent the resin to run into the base of the machine I'm using this this is some foam yeah like a cone yeah round foam rope I'm going to place this directly under the column on the inside so the resin cannot run past this sorry I have no idea where this comes from we use it to fill the gap between a tile floor and the wall before you put in the chalk fill it in the corner so you don't have to use a whole lot of chalk maybe in the home improvement or hobby store or whatever you will find a source for this if you want I'm pretty sure okay as you can see I got the phone cord in here between the the slideway and the column and back here you can see the phone cord going in under the column let's see if you can get this yeah you can see the yellow foam core and they're going all the way across behind the screws same same on the side foam core in front here and the foam core going into the column and the gap all the way down to the end the foam core will crush down enough so we can leave a gap of about one millimeter and for the gap I got also an idea I'm going to take some 1.5 million square millimeter electrical insulation wire solid core wire I pulled off the insulation and I'm going to anneal it so it's soft then I will nip off four pieces put them in the cornice of the column then I'm going to put in the epoxy and I'm going to lower down the column onto the base level everything out with it I'm going to level it out by tightening the screws and crushing down onto the copper and then I've let the resin curve or the epoxy and tighten down the screws to the final torque and that's it no more work needed so that's a Neilsen of this wire okay to annealed copper you just keep it till it's glowing and then you let it cool down okay like a little let it cool down so I just cut a few pieces small pieces off the copper wire small enough so the the pressure from the screws of the column still can squeeze it down so we can align the column the right way okay okay I have a syringe and I took some pin ematic six millimeter tubing and that fits exactly about the syringe I have some mixing sticks after resin we can open that up and we will mix the whole batch just chemical MIT and now you can see how this stuff looks and yes I'm going love because this stuff is nasty and the stuff is even more nasty at least you don't get cancer fraud maybe and then this stuff is also sealed of course you can open it well that's great it's clear liquid and as soon as I mix the stuffed clock ticks I have to put it into the syringe inject it under the column drop in the copper pieces lower the column onto the resin use some painters tape to seal everything that the stuff doesn't run out and then I have to align the column and all in 50 minutes because pot life of this material is 50 minutes so I might not film every single step the cars yeah 50 minutes and first mix the compound oh great and what's a big problem is when you wear gloves when you work with a hazardous material or messy material and your nose itches that's bad times okay I think we got all in there now we stir it up they recommend our to use a machine for mixing but just mixing a small amount when they say machine mixing they talk of a batch of one kilogram these are 50 grams okay let's fill it into the syringe okay that's not all the material but oops okay there we go now we go over to the machine and injected okay now we'll see me injecting the resin into the gap between the column of the Machine and the base I try to separate the resin somewhat even you and then I put in the copper wire pieces between the two parts and I lowered down the column on to the copper I'm masking up the gap with some painters tape so the resin doesn't run out again on both sides the resin can't go out through to the inside of the machine because of the phone cord and to the outside it's secured with the painters tape now I'm tightening down the screws bit more just to have the column secured in place I don't really give much torque on them now then I remove the wooden blocks and now we are aligning the column I set up the precision square in the machines table and I run a tile test indicator along it by moving the head up and down numerous times this takes quite some time and I adjust the alignment of the of the column by tightening the screws that hold the column to the base accordingly to the readings after dial testing cater and you can also watch the movement of the column with the belt s indicator and this took me about 40 minutes 30 to 40 minutes here again I'm checking in the y-direction and in the x-direction in the end I was I got about 200 millimeter per 100 millimeter travel and that's not too bad could be better but then there are other factor that might be a problem okay I will have to wait 24 hours before I can take off the tape tighten down the screws and recheck recheck the tram of the middle of everything gone right but for you it will be only a few seconds a County four hours later and I already pulled off the tape the blue tape that kept the epoxy and between the two surfaces and I tighten down the screws with our final torque which is about some Newton meters I don't have a torque wrench that big nor a socket adapter for such a big screw to go with torque wrench so I tightened them with my calibrated right arm and when I tighten down the screws it felt very solid didn't feel like intention in a spring or something it was really like you're screwing against solid piece of steel that's exactly what you want you want nice solid and firm connection between the two machine parts and the epoxy gives not only a form-fitting connection also as an adhesive so that's not a bonus it's a module of elasticity of the epoxy a bit lower about I think one third of the emod you love cast iron that dampens vibrations between the two machine parts when you take a look in a proper book you will find that the common common knowledge is that for a connection between two machine parts you can there are only two really good options you can scrape the surface or you can cast the surface with an epoxy so that's what I did now when I tighten down the screws I watched the movement of the milling machines head or the whole column with to dial indicators in two directions and there was pretty much no movement at all when I tighten down the screws does all everything stayed absolutely in place and now I checked for the tram of the head I have the dial in the tunnel testing hitter here to sweep on a 200 millimeter circle and I started front here I'm using gauge block okay that's zero in front here now we sweep to right side of the table like here I'll go in with the gauge block and we have zero now we sweep to the left bring in the gauge block and I will bring over the camera so I'm doing this without any cuts in the video so we have zero over here too now we sweep to the back of the table bring in the gauge block again and we have zero back here - so the tram of the head is perfect that's zero zero zero zero over a circle of 200 millimeters when I announced back when I bought this mill that I'm going to use some epoxy to to shim the mill a lot of people were interested in stopping and I hope this video gives them at least a hint on how to do it and what to do of course you can always call the manufacturer of such adjustment epoxies diamond has a great telephone support and email support there is another company and skc that makes also slideway epoxies and adjusting epoxies I never tried their stuff but I'm sure it's it's just as good as de Diamond pulling their stuff so hope you enjoyed thank you for watching and see you next time

Channel: Stefan Gotteswinter

Views: 143,209

Rating: 4.927711 out of 5

Keywords: diamant, moglice, dhw, gießharz, rf45, mb4, optimum mb4, f45, tramming, weck

Id: U7Qs-J2swIc

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2016