Thread: Bridgeport head on small horizontal mill (was: new machine)

Hello All,
I'm new to this forum so bear with me...
I have recently been declared disabled and bought a milling machine to keep myself busy and dieing from boredom and mental stagnation. I hope to do some home projects and maybe some steam engine kits.
What I need help with is I'd like to know when the mill, a B & S No. 1AD, Serial No. 1820 was built and as much of the early history as I could get.
It also came with a early Bridgeport M head on the sing;e round ram.
So now the cleanup commences.
Hope thats not to much to ask for.
Jeff Albright
Charlestown, NH

Listed in 1917 catalog, so that gives an idea.

Johnoder,
Thanks for sending me a message so quick.
But yes I did go as far as looking in several catalogs to find the machine, and have come out with the 1914 to 1920's as the closest I could get using that method.
I did forget to mention in my first post that the last patent date cast on the machine is 1916.

Cool little set up for the home shop with a lot of capability in a small foot print.
It looks like a reasonable choice for a first mill/ hobby mill.
Its a relatively simple machine, and will be easy to clean up and rebuild.
Its often surprising how much difference a little cleaning and adjusting makes.

Your mill has a universal table (x, y, z and theta), and the addition of the M head allows you to use it as a drill press or small vertical mill.
The only short coming I see is that it appears to lack power feeds.

The M head should use Morse taper collets for holding mills
The horizontal spindle is likely to be a brown and Sharpe taper.

I think you will find that it preforms well with 3/8 and 1/2 end mills

I hope it came with more tooling than the vise.
I am afraid you will soon learn the mill was the cheep part and you will never stop adding to the tooling.

Several suppliers that cater to the home shop, like tooling, parts, and accessories for bench top machinists - LittleMachineShop.com will have the collets.

I recommend you pick up a reprint of B&S's book on universal mills and study up on the original tooling.
You may be surprised by what that machine was capable of with a full complement of accessories.
Finding and adding the accessories will take a lot of time and effort.

"The only short coming I see is that it appears to lack power feeds."

Look again. Powerfeed box is on the right side of the knee under the table. Table feed lever is right up front, sticks up. Looks like a crossfeed axis lever just in front of the gearbox. Side shot shows the universal joint and sliding spline driveshaft that runs the feed box. Might have to hand crank the knee up and down, and it probably doesn't have rapids, but it definitely has powerfeed, at least on the table. The horizontal spindle will have to be running to use the powerfeeds with the Bridgeport head, but no big deal there.

The universal table would be cool to use with the vertical head. Nice mill you will have a good time with it.

yep, I missed the power feeds.
If they are a gear drive from the horizontal spindle, then the feed rate is syncronized with the spindle rotation, much like the thread feeds on a lathe.
That creates some possabilities, expecialy if you wanted to do a few modifications to allow for a wider range of relitive speeds.
Think gear hobbing.

Hi Jeff,

You have a Private Message. See the top right hand corner of your screen under "notifications"

Todd

probably doesn't have rapids

True on saddle and knee. Most all the old Brownies, this one included, have table rapids by way of the "overdrive" ratio in the right hand table hand wheel.

Originally Posted by ahall

The M head should use Morse taper collets for holding mills

If an MT2 doesn't fit, then it might be B&S7. Not great, but not the end of the world. You can get new import collets and end mill holders.

If the collet looks like a 3C collet with a straight shank and then a taper at the end, then it's a B3, in which case, it's the end of the world :-)

Steve

Ahall mentions gear hobbing, to which I'll add involute gear cutting with a dividing head attachment.

Hobbing requires synchronizing to the spindle with drives and change gears and makes the more professional gear, while involute gear cutting is much easier to set up and more tedious to make adequate gears with. Hobbs are generally more expensive and cover a much wider range than involute cutters

Lot's of good gears needed, = hobbing, which you'll almost certainly have to design, (copying known examples) and build on the mill yourself.

A few OK gears needed = involute cutters and DH, both available on ebay, though the sellers of DH's are holding hands and skipping to an absurdly over-priced imagination of their worth, as is evidenced by the fact that nearly all have been listed for years now, nearly zero sales.
I should say that every now and again, someone will list a dividing head at a reasonable price and it sells but the main herd dreams on, each upping the last unsuccessful would-be seller with a yet crazier price. You'd think we were in a boom....

Now lucky you, your mill is a universal, with the horizontally swinging table. With the right attachments, good helical gears are possible but then you'll need thrust bearings in your projects.....

I'm basically saying that you have a machine that can do a great number of things slowly but very well. Should provide years of entertainment just uncovering all it's capability.

A big faceplate or chuck fitted to the spindle and you can turn (converts the mill into a good T-lathe) something in the neighborhood of a 3 foot swing, (18" from spindle center to knee ways) or maybe a little more. I'm having fun here but this last is really pretty easy to set up, how big are your model train wheels?

Now a large horizontal/vertical rotary table.....

Bob

Many, many thanks to all of the responders. I'm almost overwhelmed.
I think that the mill has feeds in all directions. There are clutch buttons on all the handles.
And yes I have been collecting and reading all of the books on all of the capabilities. It will definitely take me the rest of my life to figure out all of the functions.
I am now 51 and have been a self and shop taught hack machinist since I was 10 or so now I'll have to learn how to spell it).