Burke 126a keyway cutter

Anyone have any knowledge of these machines? I inherited one with the rest of my machine shop, and only used it once or twice for small things. I'm moving now and don't use it enough to justify taking it with me. Looking for some info on what it may be worth plus all the cutters and extras I have that come with it.

I have pictures if anyone wants to see them.

Yes, pics please. Capacity?

I always imagine those little mills being used in a production line, like making gun parts or something in WW2, part goes down the line and at a certain point needs a small key seat, some woman reaches into the tub, clamps the part in the fixture and pulls the handle.

Watching videos from small arms plants during WW2 I see a lot of that sort of thing, and also a lot of really strange operations like hand operated machines for inletting stocks.
But those small mills like that seem like they were made to fill a dedicated repeat job rather than daily changing operations one would use a regular mill for.

I had a Benchmaster mill with a rack and pinion lever for raising the table, it never did fit into my concept of a regular machine shop mill, and not just because of the small size.

Here are some pics. My great uncle who I inherited all the stuff from used to build model steam trains, so it was big enough to do what he needed with it.

Yes, that's quite a bit more versitle than my old Benchmaster.

Burke Universal

You have a Burke Universal with power feed. These are nice little home shop horizontals. Many years ago I owned the production model with rack and pinion table movement. Mine was no good for tool room work; yours is! The one I had was complete with horizontal arbors and a vertical head. My brother has one just like yours.

These machines have rolling element bearings, are will made and rugged for their size. The only issue with the machine you have is that Burke machines do not have a "Back Gear". This limits cutter diameter to around 3 inches. With larger cutters the surface speed is too high for machining steel and especially tool steel. Also with a larger cutter diameter the radius is larger by definition, this results in the cutter grabbing the work and the belt slips.

This machine would be a great find for the home shop if the size and type of work / materials fit. My opinion as to value is $700 to $1,000.

That is awesome info, thanks! Now if I can just find someone who wants it, I'd let it go for less than estimated...

Everything Restorer says is true but I didn’t see mention of the universal table. That little machine would make a great platform for small gear cutting.

It's a burke #4 estimate imo is probably a bit high unless you're willing and able to sit on it for a while. There was a real nice one out my way that took 3 years to sell, being listed continually on craigslist for 700$ I finally gave him 500$ and took it home. I just bought 2 of them for about $500 each, with the original gear motors and tooling and collets. if I didnt already have two of them I'd be interested, but as it is i'm more just looking for tooling, horizontal arbors, vice, indexing head etc, than another whole machine. If you had the vertical head too then i'd say the estimate was right.

What part of New York are you in? I might be able to pass on info to some friends of mine.

If you end up willing to part with the arbors and cutters and vice, one of my machines has a vertical head and the factory 3C collet setup, and the other only came with a metric arbor, so i've been looking for 1" , 7/8 and other standard arbor sizes and cutters, and a 2nd small vice so i dont have to move mine between the 2 machines would be nice.

just for an example, in connecticut there's a burke #4 with vertical head, horizontal arbors, universal table, original gearhead motor, and the indexing head that's been up for 3 weeks at 1200 not moving anywhere yet, even with all the most desirable features in one spot.

I'm in Upstate, just outside of Binghamton. At this point I'm out of here on Friday, if someone wanted it, Id let it go cheap.

I sent you a direct message via the site.