Light Rockwell 21-122 Horizontal/Vertical Rebuild

Hey all! First post, first mill. I'm brand new to machining and just picked up a mill from my local craigslist: a Rockwell 21-122 Horizontal/Vertical mill.




I purchased it from an estate sale, and it appears the previous owners took great care of it. The ways are all in great shape, the various moving components actuate smoothly, looks like ~10 thou backlash on x-axis, the table has seen better days but doesn't have any major gouges, etc. There's a layer of dust, grime and rust in places but nothing terrible.

The only major flaw is the quill, which doesn't fully retract into the head. It feels like there is some kind of blockage in the rack/pinion gearing near the 1" mark which simply prevents it from retracting fully. The spindle bearings also feel a bit rough... but I'm hoping that's just dried up grease that needs replacing. The Rockwell yahoo group has a lot of info on replacing the bearings if I need to.

The mill also came with a ton of tooling, including an extra power feed, three vices, a rotary table, and assortment of end mills, taps, drills, punches, files, and a boring head.



Because I'm new to machining, and the mill is in relatively good condition, I really don't want to mess it up So my plan is to do a relatively mild rebuild. My main objective is to disassemble the head, clear up whatever the quill problem is and clean the spindle bearings. With luck they won't be galled too badly and I can just repack with grease.

Otherwise, I'm thinking a light stoning of the table to take out burrs, then remove rust everywhere and probably re-paint since there are spots where the paint is flaking and rusting. The horizontal arbor sounds/feels good, so I'll probably just flush and replace the oil.

I was going to use this thread as a project log of sorts and keep updating with new photos of progress, or potentially questions if I run into issues

For this project, I'm going to attempt to film as much as possible. I usually just document projects with photos, but wanted to try my hand at video. Here's my first attempt... feedback is appreciated!


Video covers an overview, some playing around with the mill (and accidentally running it in reverse, much to my confusion! Oops), and finally some disassembly/cleaning/painting of the head.

I'm still getting used to always having a camera rolling so unfortunately I missed some bits like the actual quill disassembly. But hopefully future videos will be better

That is not a rebuild. THat is a clean and repaint.

Rebuild involves restoring original machine alignments. Scrapping.

Sorry, didn't mean to get my terms mixed up, I'm new to machining in general. Should I contact a mod to get this moved this to a different forum? I can't change the current video, but any future ones i'll make sure are labeled as Clean/Repaint

When I first started pulling the mill apart I intended to do more, but I'll be honest and say I was worried about messing it up and scaled back my ambitions.

polyfractal said:

Sorry, didn't mean to get my terms mixed up, I'm new to machining in general. Should I contact a mod to get this moved this to a different forum? I can't change the current video, but any future ones i'll make sure are labeled as Clean/Repaint

When I first started pulling the mill apart I intended to do more, but I'll be honest and say I was worried about messing it up and scaled back my ambitions.

Click to expand...

If you are new to machine tools leaving things alone would be a wise course of action.

Regards Tyrone.

If you would like to learn how to scrape and rebuild your machine we are doing a scraping class in Springfield VT in April at the Gearworks, owned by a former Fellows Machine rebuilder and machine operator. Warren has a thread about the class in this forum.

Email sent!