ok first of i want to say this place is great i have been lurking about and realised just what this board was missing...A ignoramous with a monster milling machine!
so I rectified that situation today 9well yesterday it's gotten late on me again)
My Ungle and his son both work @ the same machining company. My cousin and I ran around with the owners son during our skirt chasing years. Tim, my cousin cut his teeth on a 1975 TREE mill/drill. After all these years his place of work decided to go all CNC and and to use the Bridge port machines. so the Tree had to go!
So with my connections in this scheme (the owners son is now the boss) I was able to procure this baby:
to put this machine into perspective I have a shot here with my father who stands 6 foot tall and wieghs in around 215 pounds:
WOWSERS it was soo much bigger than I suspected, Heck the look on my fathers face is "ok this is too good to be true, will it fit in the shop!?"
after watching them run the machine and show us how the auto feeds worked and how the machine head(?) tilted left to right and front to back, we were wetting our pants. It was hard not to show so much excitment that we couldn't get a better deal, but we managed.
here is the other side of the machine:
It's just frakin HUGHE!
then we started asking questions we had gathard over the past few months while shopping for a mill/drill
we were able to procure a vise and an indexer(?) allows you to clamp in a round object to be machined, and all the colets(sp) as well as all of the other tools used with this machine. The situation that allowed this to go down was that TREE and Bridge Port do not interchange so this was an odd ball to the shop. We weren't able to pick up a lathe, as they were sold the day before (BUMMER!)
then our first snag! this thing is too big for us to get off our trailer into the shop. So we had to hire somebody to bring it to us and install it in our shop. $150 SOLVED that problem.
now for the second hurddle:
as you can see this thing runs on a 3 phase power source. UT OH! we have single phase. so we start calling the power company. No charge to run the 3 phase lines from the pole to the shop, but you have to rewire the whole shop and then you pay a standard $500 a month(starting price) power bill OUCH no freakin way! so we thought we would have to sell this baby.
We called a friend of ours in our counties school systems maintenance department (electrician) he said we need an inverter.
ok so we start looking for inverters..WOW this is the ticket we can get a VFD (Variable Feed Drive) inverter that takes 1 phase 220 to 3 phase 220 for around 300 bucks WOOT now this thing will not only let our machine run in high and low gears, but we can variate the drive and mill motors even more! From best we can tell from that tag is it runs either @ 220 or 440 and the amps correlate to that voltage underneth the listing.
so what do you guys thing? Do you recon the inverter will do the trick? do you think $800 USD was too much for this machine?
sorry I got so long winded...this is my first post here I think and I wanted to let yo know there is a new kid in town that doesn't know a darn toot about machining. Hope you fellers will help me out as I already have 3 Ideas I want to explore. (no I ain't ready to take on you gods of water block design, but i sure hope you will answer alot of questions LOL
Cheers!