# Rockwell 21-100 rebuild



## j. vibert (Jan 19, 2015)

Hi all,

I've been dabbling in my company's machine shop for years, but finally started making the plunge into having my own hobby shop within my home.  Now truth be told the shop tools I had available to me at my place of work are considerably larger than I'd be able to utilize at home, and probably as a result be far more accurate.  However, my main motivation to buying my own machines was the benefit of walking away from a set up for hours at a time and not having to worry about someone messing things up for me.

I was on the hunt for a small vertical mill for some time.  Like everything in the hobbyist scale, these machines carry a hefty premium.  I don't have the room or the means to move a Bridgeport type mill into my home, and the typical bench top mills just seem too flimsy to me.  All of this made the list much smaller, but one faithful day I stumbled across an estate auction listing and saw this....


A Rockwell 21-100 vertical mill...  The auction was just shy of 2hrs away, but nothing was going to stop me from grabbing this diamond in the rough.  Unfortunately someone else there had the same intentions as I did, so the final price was a tad steeper than I hoped it would be, but in the end the machine ended up being loaded onto my trailer...


The individual on the trailer is an acquaintance of mine that I hadn't seen for some time.  We ran into each other at the auction and had made arrangements to come back the next day to pick up our winnings.  The loading went fine and the trip home was uneventful.  Unloading the mill proved to be slightly more challenging however...


I had to borrow my neighbour's car port as I didn't have enough clearance to back into mine.  Once there I took advantage of a rather large center beam and had just enough room to take the weight off the trailer so I could pull away with the ramps down...



At just under 800lbs there was no way I was going to be able to move the mill into my home and down stairs in one piece.  So that's the cue for the time lapse disassembly video...  :whistle:
[video=youtube_share;wNgDvBstslU]http://youtu.be/wNgDvBstslU[/video]
At any rate, I'm fairly new to the forum, and this is my first post other than the intro I believe.  I didn't see much in the rebuild thread genre on the forum, so I'm not completely sure if this is appropriate.  There's tons to show if anyone is interested.

Thanks for your time...


----------



## thenrie (Jan 19, 2015)

Nice catch. I'd love to have one of those.


----------



## AR1911 (Jan 25, 2015)

That's a good start, and a very nice mill. Please update this thread with your progress


----------



## T411 (Jan 27, 2015)

Nice J! I have this same machine. I'll be checking in to see your progress.


----------



## Shadowdog500 (Jan 28, 2015)

T411 said:


> Nice J! I have this same machine. I'll be checking in to see your progress.



+1 
I have the same machine and really like it for a home shop.

Never took mine apart so your detailed rebuild videos will be interesting.

It appeared that you had the quill lock lever down when trying the fine feed.  It needs to be up in the unlock position for the quill to move.

good score!!

Chris


----------



## bpratl (Jan 28, 2015)

Good find, I have been looking for a 21-100 for a long time and had to give up and purchase a G0619.
I have a real soft spot for Rockwell.


----------



## j. vibert (Jan 31, 2015)

My apologies everyone....

I kept an eye out for responses for the first while but there honestly didn't seem to be much interest.  Glad to see I'm wrong... 

Looks like I have some updating to do.

Stay tuned.


----------



## tertiaryjim (Feb 2, 2015)

vibert
I find the restoration and rebuild threads of great interest and very inspiring.
Seldom comment or thank the posters though perhaps I should.
Keep posting and give us lots of pictures as I'm certain there's a great number of folks watching like myself.
Thanks for starting a thread on this.


----------



## j. vibert (Feb 7, 2015)

So on the day I made the video a couple of posts ago, I did drag the whole works down into my basement.  Without the means to rig a chain fall overhead I had to come up with another method for remounting the back to the base...  


 That's my youngest in the back sweeping up the soon to be new home for the mill.

 Believe it or not lifting only the two pieces was still a hair difficult, but certainly easier than attempting to dead lift the back column onto the base.  At this point I was still on the fence about painting the machine.  I really wanted to just use the damn thing, but between the green and flaking nature of the visible coat I figured I'd try to knock down the top layer and live with the grey until such time we move.  Well the stripper did too good a job and softened up the oem paint, so I had to resort to a full stripping.  I'm still a fan of the granola eco-friendly stripper however, as it did make everything go extremely easy compared to going nuts with a wire wheel.

 A quick wipe down with a prepping degreaser and some tape on the machined surfaces, and I was good to go.


 I didn't have the time to paint during that evening so I opted to tear down and strip the knee instead.  Soaked it in the stripper and let it sit over night.  Woke up early and got it down to bare metal before everyone else was up and at em.

 I decided to give a DTM paint (direct to metal) a go.  Till now I have been using a automotive grade polyurethane on my machine rebuilds, but I'm not about to use a spray system within my home, and without any real means of ventilation.  Although now that I say that I forgot to mention that I did have to run out and buy a cheapy bathroom exhaust fan for my cold room.  I know that sounds odd and off topic, but the degreaser I like to use is pretty nasty and despite my best efforts was stinking up the house badly.  Fortunately "my" room has the access to the cold room.  Cold rooms, at least in my part of the woods are passively vented to the outdoors, so I rigged up the bathroom exhaust fan in the cold room and left the access door open a hair.  It wasn't much but it was enough to maintain a negative pressure, and pump the smell outdoors rather than invade the house.

 I bought the DTM paint from Sherwin-Williams.  Nice people at my location...  I went in with a paint sample of what I had been spraying previous, and although they did say they could match it fairly easily, I decided to give another shade a try.  I leaned toward a light colour.  I'm horrible at picking paint colours and figured I'd play it safe, as you can always get it tinited darker if the need be.  Frankly I'm glad I did so, as I don't like the look of what I ended up with...


 It actually looks a hair better in that pic than it really is...lol.  Needless to say I have already taken what's left of the gallon of paint I had back to S-W to have them match my first choice as best as they can.


----------



## Redlineman (Feb 7, 2015)

J.Vibert;

Post away, and in as exhaustive a detail as you can muster. Even if you get no responses, look at the views you get for a truer notion of what you are accomplishing. There is little more enjoyable for machine geeks than living vicariously through the journeys of others, and there is a ton of motivation for those viewers being generated in the looking. Don't be shy or spare, for what you can muster here will be a guidepost for everyone similarly inclined who comes after you, whether they have this machine or not.

Carry on!


----------



## j. vibert (Feb 12, 2015)

Minor update...

 Well apparently when the sales guy at sherwin-williams agreed with me that buying a paint with a lighter tone was a safe course of action because I could always tint it darker, he actually meant "yes buy that, so I can ding you for another $50 when you come back unhappy".  All of that to say that they "can't even get remotely close" to a tone similar to my colour sample. :grrr:

 Even when I told them I wasn't concerned about a direct match, but would just like something close to vaguely similar, they still gave me the "impossible" reply.  Unless of course I would like to wait for their manager to come in this Monday.  Not sure how that changes the chemical properties of paint toner, but that's what I was told.

 In the end, I just got them to alter it to the darkest shade they agreed they could and will live with it until I end up needing to move the machine again.

 On the upside I can reassemble the machine now...lol.

Here's a pic of a side by side of the original colour I tried, and the "darkened" version.


The lighting is horrific in my shop space.  Definitely going to have to do something about that.  I prefer the ver2.0 but still not what I hoped it would be.

 Here's a pic comparing the mill and a drill press belt cover I sprayed in early summer. 


I walked into the paint store planning on matching that colour.  Then got excited by the multitude of choices.  Should have stuck with my original plan...  oh well.  Just so there isn't any confusion.  That second pic shows the mill with the paint before the alteration.


----------



## samthedog (Feb 12, 2015)

I had a machine very much like yours as my first mill. It was a great machine and had I not found a Deckel FP1 to replace it, I would still have it.

Paul.


----------



## keith524 (Feb 16, 2015)

very nice! I have the same one!


----------



## walzfab (Jan 18, 2016)

It's now Jan. 2016, nice chronicling of your 21-100 there (YouTube/photos) J. Vibert, I've just joined H-M. 
 I am an owner of a near pristine 1968 or '69 21-100 mill I recently purchased from a small machine tool reseller near me.
 I've been looking for one of these Rockwell mills for some time... Finally got it! I dissassembled the machine at the point of purchase and packed it all into my 2008 Infinity G35x sedan. G35x, mill, n me survived the 50 mile trip home unscathed. At home with an appliance hand truck me, myself, and I moved every last bit of this 780 lb machine to the base ment shop, it now awaits reassembly. 
 J. Vibert did you video or photo document the dissassembly of the mill head components during spindle rebuild?


----------

