My search for a mill finally ended. I am now the happy owner of a Nichols mill. The Sunday before Memorial Day I drove 6 hours to Saint Paul to pick up my new acquisition. Loaded it up and drove home. Then I spent the next few weeks getting it cleaned and set up, as well as all the accessories I got with it
Since my shop is in the basement, I was limited by the choices of machine I could get. I was not going to be able to move a large item down my basement steps. This Nichols fit the bill perfectly. While it is over a 1200 pound machine it was easily disassembled and moved down my steps. The top separates from the base so each section was manageable. Additionally I was not going to use 3 phase or 220 and wanted to be able to convert to a 12dc variable speed motor.
For those of you who have one of these great machines you understand my excitement. They are a well build production machine quite capable of heavy cuts. They use a 40 taper so tooling is not a problem. It has an 8.5x30 table with three 5/8” slots. It has Bijur lubrication for the ways . and Based on what I planned do I wanted a horizontal.
It looked rough when I first saw it but the seller assured me it was a tight machine and was under power so I could hear it run. After taking it apart he was correct. The only place I see any signs of wear is in the sliding heads tailways. The hand scraping is still very visible but you can see some signs of wear. The rest of the ways for the bed, saddle and knee all look pristine. There is no backlash in the knee or saddle and a few thousand in the bed. Also there is not even one divot in the table. On the other hand, the vise that came with it is close to scrap. The divot holes have divot holes.
This thing was dirty. Everything I touched made my hands greasy, not just the machine but the pallet of accessories that came with it. I will do another post to go over what I got but I have thrown out about one third of the crap that was there.
I have the Nichols running on a 2.5 HP treadmill motor and while I have not done any actual projects with it, YET, I have done several test cuts. There is plenty of power even at low speeds it does not seem to notice. The spindle pulley on this is 12 inches in diameter and weighs, I guess, around 30 pounds. Once you start it spinning it is not going to stop. The motor mount for it came from the treadmill I got the motor from. A few quick welds and a hole drilled is all the fab work it took for the mounting of the motor. I made a pulley to fit over the motors flywheel so I could use the flywheel as a fan and additional momentum. It is driven by a v-belt . I did keep the original 1HP geared 3 phase motor and could go back to that if ever needed.
The crank handle for the knee was missing so I fabbed up a handle that I am quite happy with. Other than that the time spent was disassembly, cleaning, eliminating unnecessary parts, reassembly, painting and digging through boxes and bins of greasy junk looking for keeper items. There is a lot of time spent trying to organize all this new stuff.
Here are some pictures. I am not the type who stops to take pictures when I am working so there are some from the ad and a few of the way it sits now.
Since my shop is in the basement, I was limited by the choices of machine I could get. I was not going to be able to move a large item down my basement steps. This Nichols fit the bill perfectly. While it is over a 1200 pound machine it was easily disassembled and moved down my steps. The top separates from the base so each section was manageable. Additionally I was not going to use 3 phase or 220 and wanted to be able to convert to a 12dc variable speed motor.
For those of you who have one of these great machines you understand my excitement. They are a well build production machine quite capable of heavy cuts. They use a 40 taper so tooling is not a problem. It has an 8.5x30 table with three 5/8” slots. It has Bijur lubrication for the ways . and Based on what I planned do I wanted a horizontal.
It looked rough when I first saw it but the seller assured me it was a tight machine and was under power so I could hear it run. After taking it apart he was correct. The only place I see any signs of wear is in the sliding heads tailways. The hand scraping is still very visible but you can see some signs of wear. The rest of the ways for the bed, saddle and knee all look pristine. There is no backlash in the knee or saddle and a few thousand in the bed. Also there is not even one divot in the table. On the other hand, the vise that came with it is close to scrap. The divot holes have divot holes.
This thing was dirty. Everything I touched made my hands greasy, not just the machine but the pallet of accessories that came with it. I will do another post to go over what I got but I have thrown out about one third of the crap that was there.
I have the Nichols running on a 2.5 HP treadmill motor and while I have not done any actual projects with it, YET, I have done several test cuts. There is plenty of power even at low speeds it does not seem to notice. The spindle pulley on this is 12 inches in diameter and weighs, I guess, around 30 pounds. Once you start it spinning it is not going to stop. The motor mount for it came from the treadmill I got the motor from. A few quick welds and a hole drilled is all the fab work it took for the mounting of the motor. I made a pulley to fit over the motors flywheel so I could use the flywheel as a fan and additional momentum. It is driven by a v-belt . I did keep the original 1HP geared 3 phase motor and could go back to that if ever needed.
The crank handle for the knee was missing so I fabbed up a handle that I am quite happy with. Other than that the time spent was disassembly, cleaning, eliminating unnecessary parts, reassembly, painting and digging through boxes and bins of greasy junk looking for keeper items. There is a lot of time spent trying to organize all this new stuff.
Here are some pictures. I am not the type who stops to take pictures when I am working so there are some from the ad and a few of the way it sits now.
