New to me Ferro mill (Taiwanese Bridgeport clone)

[johnnyc14]

I am picking up this Ferro branded 10 X 50 Taiwanese mill tomorrow. I have been thinking of buying a bigger mill for a while now and was almost ready to order a PM949V from Matt. Then the Canadian dollar went in the toilet. This one was listed for sale locally and I went to have a look at it. It runs nicely and looks to be in pretty good shape so I bought it. I will take some pics of the move process. This should be interesting as it weighs 2500 lbs.

 

[thomas s]

That looks like a nice mill and power feed on the table also. thomas s

 

[LEEQ]

Cool find, that's a big table!

 

[xalky]

Looks like a good solid machine. Congrats.

 

[FOMOGO]

Looks like a nice mill. I think the Taiwanese machines are pretty much at the top of the import list. Looks like variable speed? Nice score. Mike

 

[johnnyc14]

Well we got the mill home but it was a bit of an adventure. The seller had told me he could easily load it on my borrowed trailer with his gantry crane. I borrowed a tilt deck car hauler trailer for the move which turned out to be a stroke of good fortune. When I got to the sellers place, it was a bitterly cold day, about-20 C with a nasty wind. His gantry crane was outside and the extension legs were seized up from rust and the cold and all efforts to free them were unsuccessful. At the retracted height it would only lift the mill about 6 inches off the ground. That turned out to be enough as I tilted the car hauler deck so the back of the beaver tail was touching the ground and backed the trailer so it sat slightly under the raised base of the mill. I slid a sheet of OSB plywood under it, wrapped a tow strap around the base of the mill and used the trailers winch to pull thr mill

 

[johnnyc14]

Sorry, I am apparently too slow and did not complete the above before it timed out. I'm not liking the forum format with my ipad but it is OK with my PC.
As I was saying, I winched the mill up to the middle of the trailer and strapped it down securely. I made the 1 hour drive to my place while my hands and feet thawed. My friend Darcy (Mitsou on this forum) met me there and we backed the trailer so the tips of the beavertail were just inside the garage door and strapped the mill to the winch cable and tilted the trailer deck down. We used pry bars to muscle it down the slope giving the winch cable a couple of inches of slack at a time. Eventually we got it to slide all the way down and onto Darcy's machine skates. In all this time I had not take a single pic so I finally remembered to take this one with my phone. Thanks To Darcy we got it unloaded with out incident.

 

[johnnyc14]

It is now sitting in my garage raised on wood blocks so I can build a rolling base for it. I decided to make the base similar to the one I made for my lathe and my PM932 mill so it can have wheel mounted to it at any time for easy moving. Because of the weight of this thing I decided to make it in 2 parts and bolt them together so I won't have to lift the mill any higher to get the base under it. The weight and top heavy nature of this machine make me nervous and I want to widen it's footprint to make it more stable. Here are some pics of the base build project.

 

[johnnyc14]

On the previous machine I was just using plain 6201 ball bearings for wheels but the front of this machine is so heavy that the outer races were breaking so I machined some steel tires and pressed the bearings into them for this mill.









I had to machine some angled spacers to use on the rear hold down studs because the top of the base is angled. I just hogged the treads out of a couple of 3/4" nuts and milled them off at a 15 degree angle.









The front and rear parts of the base are bolted together with four 3/8" grade 8 bolts on 1/4" thick flanges.



It can be rolled into position by just turning the wheels in the direction you want with a wrench and it is quite easy to push on a clean floor and much more stable feeling.

 

[johnnyc14]

This mill did not come with a handle for raising/lowering the knee. I have a length of 1.75" stainless round stock so I used a 2" long piece to machine an adapter for the knee drive splines. It is a 9 spline drive with a 1.675" od. I used a 3/16" end mill and my super spacer on my PM932 mill to machine the spline and a 15/16" hex on the other end as well as a 1/2" square drive hole to use with a drill. I started by drilling a 1/2" hole all the way through and turning the entire length down to 1&5/8". Then I bored it to 5/8" part way to fit onto the knee. Then I milled the splines with 40 degree spacing. I found that if I milled out 4 degrees on each side of each 40 degree interval it gave the correct dimension spline to fit the machine.