hackmaster J
Aluminum
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2005
- Location
- peoples republic of new jersey
while i know leveling machines can be tedious i don't think it's rocket science. that said i'm a little puzzled about this one. i have a cincinnati 17x42 hydrashift toolroom that i got a few years back and reconditioned it best i can (no refinishing of the ways or carriage). at the time i roughed the machine in. now i decided to do some maintenance on my machines and re-level them. when i checked the hydrashift i found that i had roughed it in a little better than i thought, so now i'm gonna give it the fine tune. i get out the levels and manual, clean the area and have at it. the manual says to take the twist out starting at the head then finishing at the tailstock then level it end to end. there's four points at the headstock and two at the tailstock. so i get this thing pretty much dead nutz on all the way round, make sure i don't have a soft foot and everything looks great. then (and this is where i knew things would unravel) the manual states to level the machine crossways by placing the level on the wings of the carriage and run it end to end checking for variations (which i knew would happen). huh? i figured IF the machine was new as the manual was written for wouldn't taking the twist out of the bed assure the carriage would have no variation end to end and leveling it crossways wouldn't be necessary? i forget how much it varied but it was at least .0015. of course this machine has wear and i'm not trying to work in tenths. i can get the variation out of the carriage end to end but then of course the machine is out of level when checked across the ways. i was thinking the best thing to do would try to draw a compromise between having the twist out of the ways and having the carriage travel level end to end and would "think" keeping the carriage level would tend to give better accuracy. am i just an idiot that doesn't know what they're doing or is this a matter of wear in the machine? one thing i forgot to mention is that the manual says to place the level on the vees but this requires a 1/16 spacer on the rear vee because it's shorter than the front so i just used a pair of .600 gauge blocks and leveled off the flats.