I think if you tried out your slotter attachment, you would use it often; I have a slotting attachment for my #2 Brown & Sharpe universal mill with 3" stroke, and also a 6" Pratt & Whitney vertical shaper; both are wonderful tools that give accurate results with little effort on the part of the operator; the only hard part is finding tools for them ---- I recently made a 3/8" square tool from HSS, and it is pretty time consuming, even with a Tool & Cutter grinder. I have been able to find some on E Bay, but they come up rarely.
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Looking? Shaping Attachment For Bridgeport Mill, Attaches On Spindal
- Thread starter Mike8623
- Start date
It all depends on what your HM needs are. With the slotting projects that I have had. I use the quill on my Bridgeport mill. Yes, it ain’t made for that operation. But, I take it slow and it works for me. Turning the Bridgeport ram around to get at my slotter is too much work, especially when I put the head back in front and have to tram it. But it’s good to have the slotter, if that big slotting job ever happens, I’ll be ready!...Good Luck benmychree, Dave.
I just remembered another thing; in my shop, I had a Induma Bridgeport type mill; someone tried to broach with it, and broke a tooth on the quill; they then tried to weld it up and made an awful mess of it, I then bought it, and was able to order a new quill from Italy and replace it. Induma makes a good machine, this was a model 1-S, and had larger way surfaces than a Bridgeport. The only drawback was that it had a larger diameter quill than the Bridgeport which would not allow the use of the usu8al Bridgeport accessories.
I hope the new Induma quill fit properly. Bridgeport lapped them to fit each head,I believe.
Yes, the new quill was slightly oversize; I used an adjustable Sunnen hone to size the bore, and achieved a nice fit. These are not the common glaze breaker hones, with the Sunnen, you can achieve a round straight bore without bellmouthing.
I just bought a sloter attachment, hasn't arrived yet. It is a Universal Slotmaster, and mount to a round ram. That's about all I know about it. There are a lot of the Bridgeport E heads (the sloter heads) on ebay with starting bids or buy it now prices in the 1400 range, but if you see one go for auction, they tend to go for about 700. People still buy them for the higher price, but I assume those are people who haven't done much research or need one right now for a project. The one I got I paid 400 for. Looking forward to seeing it. Marvin made a small one for the Atlas milling machine that ran from the horizontal spindle.
I didn't find it a huge inconvenience to rotate the ram to bring the slotter to the front. The inconvenience was in having to slightly reduce the thickness of the end of my ram to FIT the slotter!! My clone was a little too thick. I accomplished this by first scraping the paint off the bearing surfaces of the ram. Then,I clamped a carbide lathe tool in the chuck,cutting edge up,and ran the table back and forth many times,slightly shifting it sideways until I got the flat area of the end of the ram the correct,snug fitting thickness to slide the slotter on. THAT was the most trouble,but well worth it as the plane making problem was solved!