digital round ram !

the rumor is true fellas

i have this old school round ram bridgeport , i have changed the brass nuts & am pleased with its performance .

theres just 1 thing ............those unforgiving DIALS ! I couldn't take it no more , my hat goes off to u vetrean tool makers . WOW , i never wanna deal with those dials ever again .

Maybe i have been babied , non the less I got off my wallet & scored the mitutoyo KL system ( DRO ) . Sure it was a good deal , my lack of knowlage & questioning ( just to horney to get a DRO ) had landed me in a situation .

My round ram , is almost like a mini mill . Shes heavy , but he head has no power feed . Its MT2 & the table is about 32" long & maybe 8" wide .

I bought this DRO system a 30" by 12" ( linear scales ) ..........what a tool !( ME ) That is the working parameters .....so with my X axis sticking out 2 & 1/2 " on both sides of table . Like i said i was horney for a DRO .

I tryed to flip it on ebay , I was asking $1400 for it & had minimal bites .

Mitutoyo gives such small parameters for error when instaling . The Y axis was a peice of cake ( some killer adjustable brackets ) but the X . Pretty straight forward , but drilling the table fron the back side with a hand drill .......Brutal , i was thinkin of fabing up some adjustable brackets that help aid in the alignmebt .

My holes are not " dead nuts " for paralellizem ( terrible with grammer but good with #'s hahahaha) but counter reads strong .

Like anything , I have learned that " if its out of spec. & works , that will prob. promote premature failure of one componet or another. ( union millwright )

I have a few questions , please hold my hand through this , never did DRO install

1. the X axis linear scale is much to big for my R-R bridgeport .........if i stay connected , will there be any complecations ( some parts of scale will no be used until i buy a " real bridgeport " ) ?

2 . some one please help me make sence of the user manual . It has some kick a$$ software . I know that if i can learn to utilize this software it will save me $ . Its there in black & white , fellas ......All i ever used a DRO for was indexing & most importantly DATUM . I was reading that it will aid in " popin holes" for a rad. ..........thast killer , the round ram doing rads LOL


thanks

The main thing is not to bump or break the scale...so anything you can do to make some metal guards to protect it until you can get a larger machine (which begs the question, is the scale for a 42" or 48" table...you'll probably have to shop around that).

Sorry, don't know much about the Mitutoyo (?) DRO system as far as software. But the bolt-circle algorithm is quite a nice feature on any DRO.

A small table, round ram Bridgeport is still a very nice machine. But the M-head has spline clatter and the aluminum belt housing acts as a megaphone to amplify any chatter. The spline clatter and tool chatter are resonated in the belt housing, and the finish soon looks like a record. If you can, adapt a J head to it. I have an M-head, and have experienced this stuff first hand.
I have shortned a Mititoyo capacitive scale before. Not too hard, just maticulus.
-Doozer

thanks fellas

keep em coming

hanging off the ends is no big deal.

if you got it aligned well enough so you do not have any binding it's good to go.

I.E. if the reader were not bolted, and you can move the table both ways to limits, and your reader lines up with the holes and doesnt bind etc... sometimes need shims, etc... as long as it isn't going to bind it wont wear out.

I just put a Newall scale on my lathe that is way oversize but it works for me. I snould try to flip it for the right size but they dont ebay very often.

I installed a used bridgeport DRO on my VanNorman #12. Its a 32X12 DRO on a 18X7 machine. The X scale overhangs the table. Works just fine though. No fancy features- just XY absolute and incremental, metric and english.


Kevin