Thread: Small horizontal mill surplus to my needs

Due to the acquisition of mill no 4 recently, my faithful baby horizontal mill with fixed (no quill) vertical head is surplus to my needs.

Normally, being in Tasmania I'd advertise it on Gumtree or consider the wider audience, maybe Ebay and crate it etc. However I'm coming over to Melbourne then out to Donald and across to Raymond Island around the 14th November, so delivery in a fairly big chunk of Victoria is possible.

It's a nice little machine - 30" x 8" table, 16" X travel, 5" Y travel, 14" Z. The vertical head eats some of the Z as they always do. Possible to fit a riser block but I've never needed to - the top of the head is a separate casting with all the spindle gears, back gears etc. Total of 6 speeds, 3 direct drive and 3 in back gear similar to a lathe back gear setup. Speeds are pretty slow - it's capable of running a 6" diameter side & face cutter. If you want to use 1/16" end mills in the vertical head, this is not your mill. Plain bearings so it can't really be sped up a lot. Total loss lubrication system.

Power is 3 phase but the motor sits on a big angle bracket so a piece of cake to swap to single phase. Power feed on the X table axis.

There's some tooling. Clamp kit, 3MT collets, some other 3MT tooling for the VH, various arbors etc for the horizontal spindle which is an oddball taper. I made a pile of tooling for it back when I bought the machine, never needed anything else since. No vise etc as that stuff is going on the new machine.

I've owned this machine for 30 years. It was my first mill and spoilt me in a way, I've never been able to take drill-mills etc seriously. I used it by preference instead of my B/port for all gear cutting & slotting type operations. It's a much heavier and somewhat larger machine than a Hercus horizontal mill. There is almost zero wear, a lot of the original scraping marks are still visible.

Basically I'm not sure how to proceed from here. I don't really need the space so it doesn't have to go. It's not really going to get used though so it'd be better off in a new home.

So - any interest? If so I'll think seriously about putting an ad either in the marketplace forum here or more widely on Ebay etc. Pricing - don't know yet, but if I decide to use an auction there will be a reserve so there's no hope of picking up a 'tool gloat' deal, trust me on that.

A few pix....

PDW

Interest yes; money no.

I am with Bryan with regards to money but I am also interested. I would like to see more pictures including the attachments and vertical head.

Dean

This post came across closer to an outright for sale pitch than I really intended. Sorry about that. Been going through the pluses & minuses of it, what to do, how to do it.

I guess the thing I'm pondering is, what does one do with a machine that has given you 30+ years of faithful service but has been superseded? I no longer need it or use it, but equally I don't need the space or, really, the money. My boat build would just eat the money anyway, as boats do.

At this point I'm inclined to oil it well to preserve all its sliding surfaces and give it an honourable retirement to the corner of my shop. My original plan was to keep this mill for a possible future time when I'd have to scale back my shop to say a single car garage or similar, as friends of mine have had to do in their later years. I have a lot of space at the moment, more if I got the boat finished & ejected. As I said, it's easy to convert this mill to single phase and it'd complement my single phase Maximat 11 metric lathe. As I recently acquired a metric Deckel type toolroom H/V mill with ISO 40 spindles the original plan got superseded as the new machine has about the same physical footprint & work envelope but is a better match for the Emco. Even the paint matches.

Well, if I decide to do anything I'll put a link on the Ebay etc thread, but the more I think on it, the less I'm inclined to do anything.

PDW