Atlas Milling Machine refurbishment and upgrade

Hazmatt_(The Underdog), Sun Jul 09 2017, 04:48AM

Okay, so I have a little mill because I have a little garage, and we have to put our cars in at night so space is limited, otherwise I would have an enormous Bridgeport or a Tree.

That being said, I am on a path that I hope is productive and proves to be a good idea.

So this is a small machine and it can do small jobs, but it has some real limitations, and the power feed is a big one. The power feed on this machine is too fast, and I want to preserve horizontal operation because it powers the table power feed, and i hope to hob gears in the future. The idea here is to increase the power to the head unit and preserve the machine as much as possible.

I got the machine with the motor I am re-using, so that was a freebie, and I purchased the vertical head from the machine shop website, but I was still getting some slip from the belt system that normally drives the Atlas, and the bearings tend to get a bit hot after prolonged use, and there are a host of other issues as well.

My goal is to reduce the complexity of the drive train, preserve the machine, and I think this works out fairly well. I was looking at DC motors, but I already had this one like I said, and this was a cost effective use of what I had on hand.

I fabricated the brackets with the mill, did the boring operation to get the large holes (scary as hell to boot!), milled the linear bearings, everything. Now the project is wrapping-up with the wiring of the oil pump, and a wiring overhaul with oil resistant wire and it's really shaping up. Still needs a proper paint job, but that will have to be another day, just getting to this point was a huge hurdle.

In a few days I will have some Buna tubing for the oil circulation path, and hopefully I can get the flood coolant setup finished out to make this a really neat capable machine.

cheers.