# Bridgeport Mill - Rebuild by Kay Fisher



## HMF (Nov 29, 2010)

Hi Folks,

This is a great article on rebuilding a Bridgeport "M" Head. Here is the link and an excerpt follows:


http://www.neme-s.org/shapers/bridgeport.html



Excerpt:
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Bridgeport Mill - Rebuild
by Kay Fisher 
Visitor Counter 

Bridgeport Round Ram M-Head - After Photo by Kay Fisher 


Acquisition
At the September 2001 NEMES meeting, Ken Malsky offered an old M-head Bridgeport mill for sale for $300. I figured that it would go fast. At the October 2001 meeting I asked Ken if he sold the mill. To my shock he had not. I told him that I would take it on two conditions. One - it had to fit in my basement. Two - I would need some time to move it since I had done no planning. We shook hands on the deal. 

After some email exchanges it was determined that it would indeed fit in my basement exactly where my current mill (a Clausing 8520) was sitting. The old round ram M-head Bridgeports are the shortest mills that Bridgeport ever made. This one had a 32-inch table (the smallest Bridgeport ever produced) and a 9-inch knee instead of the now more common 12-inch knee. 

The Bridgeport came with a home-brew 1-3 phase rotary converter. This was an idler style arrangement with a large heavy motor. Ken also offered free a replacement C-face single-phase motor and an aluminum plate suitable for mounting it and a few Morse #2 collets (1/2", 3/8", 1/4"). 

I passed on the motor accessories. I knew that I would want to power the mill with a VFD so that saved me hauling away the two extra heavy motors. 


Moving
We lightened the mill by removing the head, the motor, and the table. The head and motor came off easily. The table caused us some head scratching. First we removed the original Bridgeport longitudinal power feed assembly, which I did not intend to use. Then we thought we would just slide the table off the end. What we didn't account for was the extreme wear. As the table moved off center, it tightened up considerably. After we discovered how to loosen the adjustable gib, it came off easily. I managed to put the motor, head, longitudinal power feed, and table in the trunk of my Mustang. 

I arranged for help from a friend with a flatbed trailer that he uses for moving cars. Ken Malsky's neighbor had a brand new backhoe. We rolled the mill out of Ken's garage on the homemade pallet with four casters. His neighbor wrapped a chain around the ram, picked it up with his backhoe, and sat it on my neighbor's trailer. We were a little anxious while the backhoe laid the mill on it's back, but it went over without any fuss. 

After we drove the trailer and chained down mill to Orange, I called a local tow truck. For $35, he picked up the mill with a sling around the ram and slid it down the basement bulkhead stairs on two 2x10 planks. 

At this point I had the mill in my basement and proceeded to take it "completely" apart. After many hours of work on the mill I was given the chance to take an early retirement package when Hewlett Packard bought out Compaq. So we sold the house and moved to Mesa Arizona. Again, I hired the local tow truck operator. He picked up the base column, turret, and ram as one assembly and sat it in my driveway. I rolled it into the garage on its homemade pallet. The fellow who bought my house had access to a large truck with a lift gate. On moving day, we put it on his lift gate and raised it to the moving van and rolled it in. After we got settled in Arizona and the movers arrived, we used a bobcat with a forklift front end to pick it out of the van and place it in my new workshop. 

To maneuver it around the basement and shop I raised the edge of the base unit with a crowbar and placed steel rods under it so I could roll it around. 

The base unit weighs around 900 pounds and the complete milling machine around 1900 pounds. The base unit and the knee were the only two pieces that I could not pick up alone. 


Documentation
Bridgeport manuals are readily available on the Internet, on eBay, and from friends at NEMES. My current favorite manual is part of a CD that I got from Errol Groff for $10. 

Errol sells a CD that started out devoted to shapers but has expanded to many other types of machines. Included on it is the M-105H Bridgeport Series I Milling Machine Installation, Operation and Maintenance Manual. A total of about 450 Meg of information for $10.00 shipping included. If you would like to just download the 2.4Mb Bridgeport manual click here. 

Errol accepts cash, check, money order and PayPal. He has shipped out about 150 copies and has yet to have anyone ask for a refund. 


Latest CD Contents as of 14 Jan 2003
Bridgeport Manuals
1981 Programming Manual
1983 Programming Manual
R2E3 Manual
Series II NC Programming Manual
Student Manual
Bridgeport Series 1 Install, Operate and Maintain
Manual
Quick Change Tooling for the J Head
Brown and Sharpe
No. 3 Mill Manual
Fundamentals of Machine Tools
Grinding and Lapping
1907 Treatise on Grinding and Lapping
Grinding Dressers
J and S Fluidmotion
Optidress Manual
Selecting the Right Grinding Wheel (Norton)
Tangential Wheel Dresser
Jacobs Chuck
Jacobs Rubber Collet Chuck
Leblond 15 and 19 Inch Lathes
Leblond Manual
Machinery Repair
Odds and Ends
Thread Elements Jones and Lamson
Shaper Work
Shapers - Chapter 1 and 2 Machine Tool Operation
Errol Groff
180 Middle Road
Preston, CT 06365 8206
Errol Groff
Instructor, Machine Tool Department
H.H. Ellis Technical School
(860) 774-8511
Home Page:

http://pages.cthome.net/errol.groff/

One source for Bridgeport information is the Yahoo group "Bridgeport_Mill" which you can join at http://groups.yahoo.com/.


Another is Tony Griffiths' machine tool information website. This site has information about many machines, including lathes and mills. The Bridgeport area includes descriptions of accessories that haven't been made in years: 

www.lathes.co.uk/bridgeport


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