Trade Or Not

Silverbullet

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May 4, 2015
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Ok Ive got a chance to trade my new in the crate Harbor Freight Green drill mill. The trade is a 1982 Jet small knee mill with dros. made in Thailand machine . Looks good no table dings or cuts , table is off mill so I can see the table ways look ok the cross slide I can't see the scrapping so I'm waiting on pics close up , the motor is new a little dirty but ok. My reluctance is if the ways are worn on it . Just don't know if I'm making a move up or behind. He wants a smaller one to fit in his basement area he has for it. I posted this in another thread in the forum if I shouldn't delete one. I don't have any luck trying to post pics with my iPad I can email them but don't no if that would put them here. I tryed to post them no go.
 
If it was home shop probably good,if production shop(?). Some good stuff came out Taiwan late 70's-80's. Have a 84 Sharp LMV and 79 Takisawa lathe, rock solid. Jet was on the low end of Bridgeport clones.
 
If the jet is in good shape I would trade so fast it make your head spin. But first I would want to know why the table is off.
 
If it's a Jet JVM-830 like mine, I'd dump the mill/drill in a heartbeat. Depending on condition of the knee mill of course. Here's mine. I had a Grizzly mill drill to start with, would really HATE to go to that again after owning a knee mill.

Bruce


mill.jpg
 
I'll warn you: I bought an Enco turret mill just like the pictured one,in apparently GREAT condition. Perfect paint,table bright. This was about 12 years ago,when my wife moved her jewelry business to a different location. I thought I'd buy a few machines to keep there.

Well,the table feed screw on the long axis(X axis),kept jumping the nut it ran in. So did the crossfeed screw. I took the table off,and found that they had only tapped the nuts about 15 THOUSANDTHS DEEP!!! Enco offered no new replacement parts. It looked just like a Grizzly,so I wasted about $45.00 ordering a couple of new nuts. They would not fit at all. The exceedingly shallow threaded nuts were TYPICAL Asian CRAP. And,this WAS a Taiwan mill!!! They were DEFINITELY NOT worn shallow. They were made that way,and the internal threads were quite crisp and new looking.

Since the screws were metric,the dials had an annoying extra several thousandths on them PER TURN. I had not noticed this when I bought the machine. This would be a PITA to move the table accurately for several inches,with uneven dial graduations. So I ordered some high quality IMPERIAL acme threaded screws from MSC,and was planning to make nuts to fit them and re cut the dials to be .200" in one turn,like my Bridgeport clone. My wife then decided the building cost too much to rent,so I had no use for the mill and sold it.

So,if your table is off anyway,look into the interior of the holes in the brass nuts and make sure they are decently threaded!!!!! Also make sure the dials come out EVEN,and DON'T have extra left over grads at the end of a full turn. The table may be off the machine because it is jumping the nuts.
 
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