Clean & Repaint of a Rockwell 21-122 Horizontal/Vertical

[keeena]

I found your thread/watched your vids after posting an unrelated thread in this Rockwell forum. I liked the "rebuild" series - neat mill! Love to have one in my garage - its on the list.

For tapping or threading SS, I learned the hard way too. You definitely need quality taps/dies. The cheapos are garbage compared to quality brands. Buy once cry once. A long taper (starter tap) is a must. A 2- or 3- flute tap (vs. 4 flute) can also help.

What size drill were you using? On harder materials you can go with a smaller thread engagement (which means larger drill size). For 1/4-20 at the usual 75% thread you'd be using a #7 index. But for SS you could go as low as 60% thread and be plenty strong. But say 65%: you'd be at a #5 index. This little bit of extra size helps. (I should note: i'm just a hobbyist, but this is straight forward info from machinery handbooks).

One other thing I found useful on SS is a mix of tapping fluid and anti-seize. Picked this up from a vid on youtube and seemed to work better than straight cutting fluid for me.

 

[polyfractal]

I found your thread/watched your vids after posting an unrelated thread in this Rockwell forum. I liked the "rebuild" series - neat mill! Love to have one in my garage - its on the list.

For tapping or threading SS, I learned the hard way too. You definitely need quality taps/dies. The cheapos are garbage compared to quality brands. Buy once cry once. A long taper (starter tap) is a must. A 2- or 3- flute tap (vs. 4 flute) can also help.

What size drill were you using? On harder materials you can go with a smaller thread engagement (which means larger drill size). For 1/4-20 at the usual 75% thread you'd be using a #7 index. But for SS you could go as low as 60% thread and be plenty strong. But say 65%: you'd be at a #5 index. This little bit of extra size helps. (I should note: i'm just a hobbyist, but this is straight forward info from machinery handbooks).

One other thing I found useful on SS is a mix of tapping fluid and anti-seize. Picked this up from a vid on youtube and seemed to work better than straight cutting fluid for me.

Thanks for watching! I'm pretty happy with the little Rockwell. There are definitely times that a larger Bridgeport would be nice, but generally it does what needs doing, just need to slow down sometimes.

I hear ya with quality taps! After destroying all those cheapo taps I bought a bunch of new-old-stock quality taps off ebay. Life has been much happier since then Also got some spiral taps which have been nice as well.

To be honest, I don't remember what drill I used... but I think I was on the "more engagement" side of things. I've never been sure how much is needed and opt for more over less. I'll try less engagement next time in a hard material like SS, not sure why I didn't think about that. Thanks for the tip!

Will try the anti-seize too! That's a really clever idea