The mill being here, in pieces, and a bench now being available for assembling said pieces onto, I'll be assembling it, and trying it out, over the next few days. This post will, accordingly, be growing and otherwise being edited without notice as things progress.
This is an inch-pattern NexGen mill, model 5800, with Package A and the DRO option, so 5800A-DRO. While I was at it, I ordered various accessories (rotary table with tailstock and right-angle adapter, tilting angle table, sensitive drilling attachment, and some fiddly stuff).
One thing I'd noticed before it arrived was the mounting holes: the documentation gives the pattern, but doesn't show the hole size. (Turns out it's ¼".) Now having the hardware in hand... Figure 18 shows the 5800 series having six mounting holes, but the hardware I see in front of me has only four. Or... I guess they tried putting two sets of dimensions on a single drawing, instead of having one drawing for the 5800 and another for the 2000?
Anyway. The base is well goobered with sticky grease, which is encrusted in turn with packing-material fragments. Takes a bit of cleanup, and I'll probably want to replace the grease with something lighter. Synthetic motor oil, maybe, or gen-u-wine way oil fit for a Bridgeport (whereof I have most of a jug). Sez the manual:
Use a light oil such as sewing machine or 3-in-1
oil or grease on all points where there is sliding contact. This
should be done immediately after each cleanup. We grease
the slides at the factory to ensure the lubrication stays in place
during shipping, but light oil will work fine once you begin
using the machine. Do NOT use WD-40 for lubrication!
Methinks either motor oil or way oil falls somewhere on the "light oil or grease" spectrum.
For a mostly-aluminum machine, this critter is heavy. Methinks I don't really want to get too far in assembling it until after the chip pan (Amazon calls it a "baking sheet") arrives on Sunday. Assembly can wait until after the base is bolted down to the bench with the chip pan under it.
Speaking of chip pan: 'twould be a nice option for Sherline to offer, wouldn't it? That and a dust cover sized for the 5800 series (it doesn't look like either of the sizes on offer is big enough).
Life would be easier if there were a list of what parts came in which bag; they're not grouped nicely by subassembly. Also: the instructions for "2000- and 5800-Series Mills—Assembling and Mounting the Multi-Direction Column" are for the 2000 series; they don't match the 5800. This is extra confusing.
I've already ordered some scaled-down tools for tasks like, e.g., tramming the head. I have the proper dial test indicator and holder for tramming the head on a Bridgeport, but the spindle nose on the Sherline is kinda smaller, so a different holder is required. Also on the way: a mini surface plate (I used to have a normal-sized one, back in the 90s, but that got left behind somewhere along the line and it wouldn't fit on the Sherline's table anyway). Also ordered a 3/8" center/edge finder, as the ½" ones from back when are, again, a few sizes too big, and I figure a 3/8" should fit the endmill holder.
I did find those little lathe chucks and faceplates that I'd had since forever, and they do indeed fit the Sherline spindle thread. They're a bit rusty, though. I'll probably end up buying a brand shiny new Sherline 3-jaw to go with the rotary table. Ah... the 3-jaw for my old Taig also fits, and is of similar (not identical) construction, and in decent shape. Maybe I need to take a closer look at how the current Sherline chuck differs from these.
I don't think Sherline has gotten fully into the JIT mindset. One of the accessories was packed with a piece of newspaper from October of 2011.
The DRO handwheel thingies came pre-installed, but the tach sensor/decal for the spindle is a DIY project. This involves drilling a 1/16" hole in a location that's highly inconvenient after the headstock/motor unit is assembled, but would have been easy earlier.
It looks like M6 socket-head cap screws would be just about perfect for mounting the base to the bench, if I were confident about my ability to hold close tolerances in marking locations and installing the threaded inserts. Being not so confident, I guess I'll go for M5 and washers. Should be strong enough. Bonus: it seems that the M5 inserts want just about a ¼" hole (I need to verify this on some scrap wood), which is handy if I use the base of the mill as a drilling jig.
Anyway: I now have it mostly assembled, but still in three pieces, each of manageable weight. The motor speed control and spindle tachometer are verified working. Further assembly awaits arrival of the chip pan, which should happen Sunday. No point assembling the whole thing and then lifting it onto the pan....
Friday evening: The 18" tooling plate came with documentation for a different 18" tooling plate. Says it's a laser engraving tooling plate, black anodized (this'n is plain shiny aluminum), with a different hole pattern. Oh, well: find and download a PDF of the corresponding document for the 7x18" mill tooling plate, which seems a better match.
Saturday morning: No, I'm not working on it this morning, other than dragging the bench into something like its final location (after moving a clutter table and assembling a shelving unit to organize some of the clutter) and pondering the instructions. There's a mysterious bent-wire-mesh thing, kinda Z-shaped, that doesn't seem to be on any drawing nor parts list. I'd assumed it was meant to be a guard of some sort. Maybe it's a stand for the DRO box?
Saturday evening: The mail came very late today, but included all the things I'd been expecting from Amazon tomorrow, including the baking sheet chip pan, and one unreasonably heavy box that just barely fit in the mailbox (so I had to lug it all the way up the driveway; parcels too big for the mailbox get left by the garage, but the ones that do fit get left in the box, way down there at the curb). What's so heavy? Ah... a rock. With a certificate of calibration. 96 cubic inches of shiny granite. Um, call it 2.7 g/cc, and that works out to... 1573 cc, so about 9340 millipounds. Sure felt heavier than that while I was carrying it.
The design of the chip pan is faulty; the rim stands too tall for easy use of the Y-axis handwheel. It's almost like Nordic Ware didn't intend it to be used under this model of milling machine. Guess I'll have to do some cutting and/or bending.
Sunday morning: On closer examination, the right-hand side of the pan also gets in the way of fingers when cranking the X axis over. So... I guess I need either a significantly shallower pan or some sort of standoff(s) for mounting the mill. After it gets light, I'll rummage through some of those Bins in the Barn™ to see if I have aluminum stock suitable for the purpose. Gotta be big sturdy standoffs, but I'm thinking that a couple of pieces of extruded aluminum a couple of inches wide by half an inch thick or so - by, of course, something more than the width of the mill's base - might be appropriate. Or, heck, a couple of pieces of stainless steel of such dimensions. (Oog. But, if I use standoffs, I need correspondingly longer screws. Or, I mount the standoffs, through the pan, to the bench, with offset holes for mounting the mill to the standoffs.)
Sunday afternoon: Looks like lifting the mill by ½" will do the trick nicely. Rummaging through barn bins, I find a piece of extruded aluminum of suitable size, assuming I can cut it neatly into appropriate lengths. Also two cutoffs that would, as a set, be perfect were they but 1" longer each.
Well, no more time for this project today. Maybe Monday.
Thursday morning: I omitted to mention here ('twas in the Tuesday report) that I'd thought better of the idea of supporting the mill by the ends on piers, as it were, and instead ordered a chunk of aluminum of correct size. Well, a bit oversize. Said chunk of aluminum having arrived yesterday afternoon, I drilled some holes in it, put the nonferrous-metals blade on the Big Scary Saw, cut it to length, drilled holes through the chip pan and into and through the bench top (intentionally, that was), and, with some considerable fiddling, got it put together:
Yes, the garage is rather cluttered. It's gradually improving, though.
The minimum spindle-nose-to-table distance (not shown) seems a bit much, but I haven't yet installed the tooling plate, the endmill holder, and an endmill; once I do that, I'll see how close it comes to carving up its own tooling plate.
I still need to sort out cable routing. And set the backlash compensation on the DRO. And, well, try actually carving some scrap piece of aluminum.
Since (according to the latest forecast) we only have a couple more dry days before a rainy week arrives, maybe I'd better put this on hold for a rainy day and go do some outdoors stuff instead.
Friday afternoon (23 October): Got the tooling plate installed, and... that spindle-to-table distance is still looking very excessive. Contact Sherline. Apparently a standard-length endmill should end about ½" above the tooling plate, which says that I've somehow ended up with the column more'n an inch above where it's supposed to be. It gets to be the end of business hours before this is sorted out. Meanwhile, I set the backlash compensation on the DRO, and do some fiddling.
Saturday morning: I want to try cutting something, dagnabbit! Mount the vise to the tooling plate. Look for the parallels... hmmm? I ordered a parallel set... I thought I unpacked a parallel set... musta gotten misplaced...? Oh, well: search later; for now, there's a small thin parallel set in the barn, recently extricated from one of the moving bins. Fetch that. Clamp a random pot-metal casting (broken) in the vise, and try making some cuts, with and without the DRO.
A Bridgeport it ain't, but anything even vaguely close to a Bridgeport wasn't happening this year. It takes care and patience... but it does cut metal, smoothly and precisely. Which is exactly what it's supposed to do. And it looks like the DRO is going to be a big help.
Oh, and there's an uncommitted #10-32 hole in the left-hand side of the headstock. I'm thinking of adding a mist coolant system and/or a light, so having an attachment point will come in handy.
The first couple of projects in the queue don't actually require resolving the spindle-height issue, just sorting out work-holding, so at this point I think I have a useful machine.
Monday morning: With the Sherline folks back at work, they spotted the problem: there's a headstock extension missing. I don't know if it was missing to begin with, or if UPS managed to lose it when the box got banged up in transit. Anyway, they're sending me one, so that should get everything lining up as one would expect.
The product looks good, and so does their customer service. Documentation could use some updating, though. And maybe separate assembly instructions for each product?
Right now, I have other priorities than machining small parts (or, for that matter, blogging), so I guess I'd better go address those.
Thursday morning (29 October): Yesterday, 'twas tools-for-making-tools-for-making tools time, as I used the machine to work on some specialized fixturing clamps. (Not complicated, mind you, just a bit specialized.) Eventually, I got to the point where the spindle-height issue got in the way, but up to then all was well as long as I took light cuts.
Yesterday afternoon, the missing link (saddle travel extension, plus various screws and a washer) showed up in the mailbox; this morning, I installed it, and now the tip of a standard milling cutter gets within half an inch of the tooling plate, which is what one would expect.
So, looks like all's well. Guess I'll finish up these clamps, tram the head properly, and ponder a mounting bracket for a mist coolant dingus and maybe a little work light. Stuff to do on a rainy day.
Oh, yes: the vise. It doesn't have a built-in handle, but uses a socket-head cap screw for tightening. The socket tends to fill up with chips, so just leaving a hex key in place while making chips seems like a good idea. Otherwise, every time one needs to loosen the screw, one must first apply a dental pick or similar.
Additional: It seems that, when making plunge cuts with a 2-flute endmill, it might be best to have the ram set as short as practical. With the ram about halfway out, the cutter seems to have rather too much leverage, causing alarming vibration. I never had this issue with the old Bridgeport; something about the difference between a 70-pound aluminum machine and a 2500-pound cast-iron machine...?
General summary: 'tis a fine piece of machinery, taken as a machine tool that UPS can deliver. The motor has plenty of power for the little machine. What's lacking is mass... but of course increasing the mass usefully would take it out of the "ships like a regular parcel" category and put it into "motor freight curbside delivery, bring your own forklift" territory.
I probably want to add some bracing to my workbench, too; I think most of the vibration I'm seeing is the entire machine moving relative to the room, rather than the spindle and table moving relative to each other. Gotta order lumber soon, for this and other projects.
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