I thought some of you fellas on here might be interested in my hybrid Victoria (Elliott) U2 with Bridgeport series 1 J- head. This is a project that I've been putting way too many hours into for several months, to the detriment of so many other things I should have been doing, but it's now near completion, to the point that I'm using it, and it all seems worth the work.
I picked up the U2 from an eBay seller a few years ago and have been bemoaning the lack of a quill, the slow vertical spindle speed and the need to take the vertical attachment on & off to utilise the horizontal arbor. A J-head in poor cosmetic nick became available and I jumped at it. After all, how difficult could it possibly be to mount that thing on the overarm of the U2?
As this is a retrospective rather than a work in progress, I'll post a bunch of photos as time permits, that will give an overview of the project.
Firstly, the J-head as it arrived from Perth, courtesy of a friend from another forum.
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Stripped down to the last screw, into a tub of 'simple green' to strip the paint and dirt, and an order placed to the U.S. for the necessary bits to make it live again.
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I had bought a defunct second U2 mill a while previously as a donor for some missing & damaged power-feed parts for my mill; the spare overarm casting allowed me to experiment a bit and figure out how to go about hanging the new hardware.
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after a few false starts and more than a few hours, I developed a plan to machine flat planes on either side of the overarm and attach cheek plates, then bolt a flat plate to the front of the cheek plates.
Had to make a large-ish flycutter to cover the necessary area on the sides of the overarm
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then figure out a way to mount the overarm on the mill to do the machining. The 10" shaper vice came to the rescue and got a lot of work on this project. The bulk of the work was done in stub-milling mode using the NT40 horizontal arbor, often with the help of a mirror.
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Once the flats were machined on the sides of the overarm, the cheekplates were made to match. I picked up a large pair of forklift tines (over 80kg each) from the local scrap bloke; they were cut at the thickest point to provide the largest frontal area, flattened on one side on the shaper, then mounted on the rotary table and a radius put on the back end to match the swing of the flycutter.
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That'll have to do for the present, more when I get a chance...