Unloading, Storage, and Placement of the New Mill

So digging back in my pictures, I realized I picked up this mill in March... long time ago. The original plan was to place it on a trailer, back it into the garage, and use an engine hoist to get it off. Long story short, the trailer wasn't strong enough, the mill was too tall to fit in the garage since it was now in the bed of my truck, and then I had to do this:

Cranking It Up The Driveway

My driveway is pretty steep, so I ended up having to place it on a skid made of 2 x 4s and winch it up with a come along. Oddly enough, this also happened to be a day with the very rare northern Alabama snow flurries. Super fun...

Once in the garage it sat for a long time since it was a pain to work on when on the ground and I didn't have anywhere to place it up high.

Storage spot. Notice the ATC sticking out on top.

 
Eventually, I got around to designing a small stand, and conned convinced some friends to help me weld it up. The stand was put together from 1.5" x 0.065 and 0.75" x 0.035 square tubing with a MDF top. Small, but sturdy enough. I used vibration isolating feet on the bottom, which ended up being a little softer (read: wobbly) than I had planned, even though they are rated to 300 lbs each. It was originally designed to be skinned with sheet metal, with doors in the front, a tray on the bottom for computer and coolant system, and a pull out keyboard tray. Since buying sheet metal would have tripled the cost of the project, it's open air for the time being. The stand:

Stand Skeleton

On the rare chance some has the same mill and needs some plans for a stand, drop me a line.

And after some fun with a rented engine hoist (bigger than the typical HF ones), it has finally come to rest at it's new home.

Final resting place.

Now on to cleanup and rewiring. A teaser:

Now on to the real fun...

A Long Absence and a New Machine

I must once again apologize for a long absence from this blog... between work and some other things going on, I haven't spent too much time working on any of my garage projects.

The one bit of news it that almost immediately after starting to purchase the parts for my Spectralight mill upgrade, I found the hobby mill of my dreams on Craigslist for a good price: a Light Machine Benchman MX (specifically a BXT-4021). For those that aren't familiar with the Benchman mills, they were the industrial line from Light Machines, and a very distant relative to the STEM style mills like my other machine. Cool features of the Benchman MX:

• One piece composite (i.e. similar to epoxy granite) base/column
• Preloaded ground ballscrews for all axes
• Servo motor control for all axes
• Recirculating ball bearing linear rails for all the axes 
• 2 hp AC servo motor for spindle (big power for a small mill, ability to rigid tap)
• Rapids of 200 ipm (a little faster than the Spectralights 12 ipm...)
• Full enclosure
• On my machine, the optional 7500 rpm spindle speed
• And finally, a 20 position automatic tool changer

 The work envelope of the machine isn't too much bigger than the Spectralight, but everything is substantially bigger and beefier. Here's the machine today:

Benchman As It Stands Today

The kicker (and why the machine was cheap) is that the interface card for the computer was missing, along with any software. I did some research on this, and these cards, if you can find them (machine was from 1998), are in the thousands of dollars to replace. I found a much better alternative, a interface card combo from Mesa Electronics, that will control this thing in the end.

That's it for today. I've got some catching up on the progress here, so expect a few more posts in the coming days to get to where the project is currently.