Dear fellow hobby metalheads,
I posted a thread earlier about my new machine acquisition - a beautiful 50s era Deckel FP1.
Since my purchase, I have made a few enhancements to it - the first one is (mostly) another acquisition - a set of TTS adapters for all tooling.
Enhancement 1 : TTS tooling
For information, my other mill is a 728VT from Precision Matthews. I really like this mill! But for some reason, I always used collets despite it being a major PITA.
Only recently I discovered that the Tormach TTS system would make my tool changing more repeatable. Even better, my toolholders could now be used across both machines.
To make this work on the 728, I ground down the face of the Lyndex R8 adapter on the 728 so that the adapter would register directly against the spindle nose.
Similarly I took a 3/4 MT4 collet that could be used on the FP1 and ground down its face so that the TTS adapter would similarly register against the nose of the spindle.
It looks like this below.
Enhancement 2: Installing a DRO
I installed a set of 1 micron glass DRO scales from Aikron. The biggest issue here was to not drill any new holes in the machine -- This was a challenge I had issued to myself to keep the machine as original as possible. There were a few holes already drilled by a previous owner and I reused them.
Somehow installing the DRO took over a week of elapsed time for me -- Lots of measuring, checking, cutting, remeasuring, cutting etc.
Everything now repeats to within 3 microns which is within the limits of what my instruments can measure. I am quite happy with the install.
Maybe there is someone else who is interested in installing a DRO on the FP1 -- I am posting a few photos that may serve as a guide in that case.
I posted a thread earlier about my new machine acquisition - a beautiful 50s era Deckel FP1.
Since my purchase, I have made a few enhancements to it - the first one is (mostly) another acquisition - a set of TTS adapters for all tooling.
Enhancement 1 : TTS tooling
For information, my other mill is a 728VT from Precision Matthews. I really like this mill! But for some reason, I always used collets despite it being a major PITA.
Only recently I discovered that the Tormach TTS system would make my tool changing more repeatable. Even better, my toolholders could now be used across both machines.
To make this work on the 728, I ground down the face of the Lyndex R8 adapter on the 728 so that the adapter would register directly against the spindle nose.
Similarly I took a 3/4 MT4 collet that could be used on the FP1 and ground down its face so that the TTS adapter would similarly register against the nose of the spindle.
It looks like this below.
Enhancement 2: Installing a DRO
I installed a set of 1 micron glass DRO scales from Aikron. The biggest issue here was to not drill any new holes in the machine -- This was a challenge I had issued to myself to keep the machine as original as possible. There were a few holes already drilled by a previous owner and I reused them.
Somehow installing the DRO took over a week of elapsed time for me -- Lots of measuring, checking, cutting, remeasuring, cutting etc.
Everything now repeats to within 3 microns which is within the limits of what my instruments can measure. I am quite happy with the install.
Maybe there is someone else who is interested in installing a DRO on the FP1 -- I am posting a few photos that may serve as a guide in that case.
Last edited:
