Intro

Hello, all,

I have had a home shop for about 17 years, now. A friend of mine
and I bought a 1941 round-ram Bridgeport mill from a LARGE home
shop business that closed. We went after the auction or sale was
officially over, but there was still a lot of stuff. There was this little
farm house on a hill, and about 50 derelict semi-trailers parked out
back. Each trailer had about 3 machines in it, some of them looked
like the machine shop on a submarine! You can imagine a huge
horizontal mill, maybe a surface grinder, and a bandsaw, for instance,
in a 20' trailer. There were festoons of 440 V 3-phase wiring running
from trailer to trailer.

Anyway, one of the leftovers was my Bridgeport. The auction or
sale (I don't remember which) was set up by the guy who bought the
whole place out, and was getting rid of the machinery he didn't need.
He came up with a set of B&S #7 collets for the M head's spindle,
which was nice of him. There was an end mill holder frozen into the
spindle, and it took us 2 weeks of building bigger and bigger gizmos
to get it pulled loose.

A year or so later, we got a 10" Atlas babbit-bearing, change gear
lathe. The spindle bearings were in awful condition, and fixing that
is not so easy. I eventually upgraded to a quick change gearbox
and a roller-bearing headstock. Later, I moved up to the 12"
Atlas.

About 2 years ago, I saw an ad in the newspaper for a Bridgeport
J head, and bought it out of a guy's garage. It needed a lot of work,
but I have it now on my mill, and it is a big improvement.

I bought the axis drives and spindle motors from an Excellon
printed circuit board drilling machine when it was being scrapped
some years ago, but didn't get around to trying to install in on
the mill until last year. I use the EMC program from NIST
for CNC control, and I love it!

I have one of the hideous $189 4x6" bandsaws, but it is sure a
lot better than a hacksaw!

I also have a 3' Chicago finger brake, a Roper-Whitney
5-ton punch press, an AC welder and an Oxy/MAPP
torch, mostly for brazing use.

I also have a setup for making printed circuit boards.
I drill them on the NC mill. I made my own laser
photoplotter for artwork, with 1000 x 1000 dot/inch
resolution. I have an etching machine that they threw
out at work. 10 minutes and a couple dabs of epoxy
made it as good as new.

You might want to look at my web pages, which have some
pictures of this gear, at : http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~jmelson/

There's probably more, but that is about all I can think
of right now.

Jon