Horizontal mill

[Mark Harris 1Participant @markharris1]

Good afternoon I’m trying to get a horizontal mill for the workshop . I’ve been offered  two  a Victoria U1 and a Archdale 20”. I can find info on the Victoria but not the Archdale. So if any of you fine gents have any info on either mill or opinions either way. I would like to hear them ? I have some large gears to cut for an on going project 14.5” diameter. Many thanks Mark

[Anonymous]

They are both fairly small mills and there may not be enough headroom to cut a 14.5″ diameter gear, so essential to check (not guess or take someones word for it) before purchase. The Victoria is a universal mill, which is great, but you lose more headroom due to the swivelling table. A way round the problem of headroom is to use a rotary table:

The gear being cut is 5DP and 14.8″ OD.

Andrew

[Mark Harris 1Participant @markharris1]

Thought this might be a possibility,just checked my rotary table and I can achieve the 71 teeth 5DP. Thank you for the photo the Victoria on paper has a 16” vertical travel. But don’t know what 20” on the Archdale is for . I’m assuming you are building a traction engine which one. I’m building a 4” McLaren road loco.

[larry phelan 1Participant @larryphelan1]

Very interesting set-up, Andrew !

Do you need to raise or lower the table in order to keep the bottom of the cut flat ?

Might sound like  silly question.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

lathes.co .uk says the 20″ is how they named their machines by the table travel. I assume X axis?

In Andrew’s photo the cut is made by raising the table, cutter is cutting downwards which is better that doing it on the other side and having the cutter try to lift the work off the table.

[larry phelan 1Participant @larryphelan1]

Thank you Jason for clearing up that point, I assumed it was something along those lines, but it does no harm to check !

Something similar crossed my mind a while ago, when I needed to clean up a gear after repair. The teeth were cut at an angle and I could not work out how to mount it on my LUX mill. I was thinking of a separate unit, driven by its own motor, to drive the cutter, the rise and fall to be worked out along the way. The milling machine would play no part, other than to hold the rotary table and this “unit”, whatever form it might take. Needless to say, this “Project”[for want of a better name ] is still on the drawing board. Just an interesting idea.  I believe there is an adaptor available to convert a VMM to a horizontal one, not too cheap.

Always interesting to see how others deal with problems, all part of the learning curve.

PS  Regarding my clean up, it was done the hard way, hacksaw and files, checking every few strokes. Worked OK, but very slow.

[Anonymous]

Vertical travel on my universal Adcock and Shipley 2E is also 16″. But of more importance is the spindle centre to table distance. For the plain (non-swivelling table) 2E the distance is 19″, but on the universal it is 16″. If we assume it is 16″ then minus 14.5″ leaves 1.5″, which means the cutter diameter has to be 3″ or less. I think most 5DP cutters are going to be comfortably larger than 3″ diameter; 3-3/4″ seems very common. My gears had 72 teeth, so easy indexing every 5 degrees. Incidentally I make the OD of a 5DP gear with 71 teeth to be 14.6″.

The 20″ dimension on the Archdale will be X-axis travel. On my 2E X-axis travel is 23″, not much more than half that on the Bridgeport, despite the horizontal weighing nearly twice as much.

Larry: It’s not a silly question. As JasonB says the cut was put on by raising the table and then lowering it ready for indexing the next cut so the cutting forces are downwards. Although not visible there is support under the gear near the periphery. Each tooth required 22 turns of the handle, followed by 22 turns the other way. I am building two engines, so four gears, and a mate who is building the same engine just happened to have his gear blanks ready at the same time. So six gears in total. It keeps you fit! I have a video of one tooth being cut but don’t know how to convert it to a file that I can post on here.

I am building two 4″ scale Burrell single crank compound engines:

 

Andrew

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I can sort that like I did before if you send it to me Andrew, won’t be until tomorrow though.

[Anonymous]

Thank you, raw file sent via WeTransfer.

Andrew

[Mark Harris 1Participant @markharris1]

Thank you for the replies. It’s seems either mill will do I will get more info on the Victoria tomorrow. So will make my decision then.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

This is Andrew getting his daily workout on the Adcock & Shipley, I can see why he advocates cutting each tooth in one pass.

[larry phelan 1Participant @larryphelan1]

Thank you Andrew for your feedback, always interesting to see how others deal with problems.

Nice to be able to see it being done.

[larry phelan 1Participant @larryphelan1]

I bet you could murder a few pints after all that !!

[Author]

Posts