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iggiebee: The process of making the head of the mill completly perpendicular to the table, involves several steps, and is called "tramming" or "squaring the head". There are various procedures and instruments to do this; a little Googling will find you related web pages. Here is one example
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Nice example, I hadn't seen the process before, though I had expected it to look something like that.
Of course I thought it amusing the way they so casually said to adjust out the error, since I don't know of an official adjustment of any sort on the Smithy, and the only way I've guessed at from looking at the unit would involve measuring, guessing at a shim value, partial dissassembly and shimming, then putting everything back and trying it again....
NOT FUN... At least for now I have started milling the channels, which I see as less critical about head tilt than the flycutting was. I just need to be sure not to mill through any walls and ruin the block. (I also wish I could mill more than .080" at a pass, it gets old when you are trying for about .5" total...)
Minor question, my milling book talks about 'up milling' vs. 'down milling' and how one should only do 'up milling'. The pictures show a cutter milling one edge of a workpiece, and I get the difference in that situation. What I'm mostly doing however is milling channels into a block where the material is going into the cutter, and so the cutter is surrounded by material in the entire 180* of the direction of travel. In that case, it seems to me like half the material is being fed as in 'up milling' and half as in 'down milling',
and I was wondering if it actually made any difference which way one travelled when making a channel. (Once you start widening it, then there is a difference, but not on the original cut...)
Gooserider