Thread: Rong Fu RF20 Mill Mods

I’ve been making some mods to my Rong Fu RF20 mill over the past few months.

First was moving the off switch to the front of the machine because I always found it a bit dangerous reaching around the side to turn it off.

The Z adjustment is a real pain on these machines and pretty early on I attached a digital scale so I could accurately set the Z. The biggest problem with the Z is that there appears to be too much backlash in the rack and pinion setup to adjust the Z and it tends to suddenly drop quite a bit when winding down from having the quill locked. You can see it the photo that I’ve got a couple of springs on the depth stop shaft in an attempt to take up the back lash, it helps but is not a 100% solution. This bloke reckons he has the problem licked with his setup.

I’ve also added some goose-neck LED lights that I screwed onto the body in forward and aft positions. The transformers for the LEDs are tucked out of the way in the hollow under the head.

Next mod was adding an X-axis power drive. On my old X2, I used a windscreen wiper motor for the drive but I always found it to be too slow to rapidly return for the next pass. I toyed with an old cordless motor with PWM and also tried a stepper motor, however, I could never get either to work satisfactorily. In the end, I decided on a fusion solution, the windscreen motor for the slow speed and the cordless motor for the rapid traverse. The gear box uses a sliding dog to switch between the two drives and when the dog is in the middle position, neither motor is engaged for manual operation.

The most recent mod is installing some digital scales on the X-axis and Y-axis. A special thanks to pippin88 for the SH igaging scales. It took a bit of stuffing around to get the Y-axis trued up and running smooth.

The last mod I will eventually do is to pin the Z rack to the column as per this post to solve loosing x-y alignment when cranking the head up/down.