Inside Doc's Machine Shop

[DocsMachine]

Day 437 of eating this particular elephant, and running low on ketchup.

Not much today, took the other part of that bit of scrap steel and milled it to shape, then drilled and tapped it all, again.



And, if I might be allowed to toot my own horn here in public without fear of arrest, it fits perfectly.



Loosen the front screws a turn and a half, and she slides right on. Snug the screws back up and it's solid as a rock.

The only drawback- and kind of expected- is the screws are tough to get at. I can reach 'em easily with a ball-end wrench, though what I might do for regular use on this machine, is cut down the short leg of a wrench, to make it easier to tighten them, once they're snugged with the ball-end. A second option is to use a shouldered screw (since they're countersunk holes) with a hex head, and simply use an open-end wrench on them.

Not the slickest setup, but I was pretty limited on what I could fit in there.

The only other thing I did was get out some solvent and scrubbed clean the base pieces for the turret:



The parts themselves are cherry- there's very little sign of wear. But on the other hand, there's also zero adjustment- as in none whatsoever. Theoretically, you could tighten up the dovetail by lightly surface grinding one of those side plates but as for up, down or left and right? None. Nothing at all. (The Warner & Swasey has tapered gibs for left-and-right, and replaceable hardened wear plates for up-and-down.)

I can hope the turret sockets are still closely aligned- and some turret tooling can be adjusted a little for alignment- but that remains to be seen.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

With the base casting suitably modified, it was a simple matter of just reassembling the slide back into place.

Simple, yes...



Okay, so it needs just a little cleaning first.

Most of the surface rust came off easily with some solvent and Scotchbrite...



But revealed that the casting had kind of a hard life, with dings, dents and hammer marks here and there. No surprises, as this assembly is probably some eighty years old. (The Hardinge "split bed" format, as I understand it, was phased out around WW2.) I smoothed down what I could first with a file...



Then hit the whole surface with a stone to knock down even the small stuff (just a cheap whetstone, which is hardly ideal, but it did the job.)



And then I evened up the surface finish with a little 600 grit wet/dry paper on a sanding block.



Slid back into place on the base casting, it looks tons better.



A little more Scotchbrite took care of the surface rust on the lever arm...



And that slid back into place with the gear, and a little oil on the needle bearings.



The travel stop blocks, screws and cover plates were simply cleaned and put back into place as well- at some point in the not-too-distant future, I'll touch those up with some fresh black, but I just didn't have time today.



One other little bit I did a few days ago, I cut some of that leftover drawer liner for both the "drawers", since I'm going to start setting this machine up with it's own tool set here shortly.



And, for those thinking I've been neglecting my other duties (can't imagine why you might think such a fool thing) my robot was churning away this whole time:





This particular one is a job that's going to eat most of the week- I still have three more full bars to cut up. In fact, I need to get a buddy's Scotch cold saw running in order to chop them up- doing it with a Portaband is annoyingly slow, and is hard to keep the cut straight.

More on that later.

Doc.