Becker Brainard No.2 Plain

Joe Michaels said:

That is a fine old milling machine you have gotten. Are you at liberty to tell us what "Alladin's Cave" of an old shop it came out of ? In your first photo, it looks like there is a small planer in the background.

I am intrigued by the vertical head on your milling machine. From your photo, it looks like it was shop made, using welded fabrication. The body appears to be made from a piece of hollow square steel tubing, welded to a piece of heavy steel plate. Whoever designed and built that vertical head was quite skilled. It is an interesting alternative to the more usual Bridgeport (or similar) head added to old horizontal mills. All too often, when something like a Bridgeport head is added to an old horizontal mill, the overarm and arbor support are lost along the way. People such as ourselves who want to use the old machine tools and perhaps restore them wind up having to "reverse engineer" the missing parts. Large diameter bar stock and steel to replace the overarm and arbor support ain't cheap !

Your post is my first real look at a Becker Brainard milling machine. From the looks of it, they were a builder of well designed and well built milling machines. Their location hearkens back to an early stage in the development of the US Machine Tool Industry, when New England was "the cradle of precision", and when Yankee Ingenuity was really blooming. It also hearkens back to an age when there were numerous machine tool builders in the USA. I imagine in the times when this milling machine was built, the Boston, Massachusetts area, on into Rhode Island and Connecticut were alive with machine tool builders and related industries such as pattern shops and foundries. There was a time when some literary light described Boston as "the hub of the universe", and some other literary lights spoke of the "flowering of New England" in terms of academia, the sciences, medicine, and commerce. It was not in their field of vision to include the manufacturing industries of New England. My own field of vision thinks in terms of fine machine tools, machinist's tools, firearms, steam engines (Corliss was in Rhode Island, and many New England engineers were climbing over each other to develop more efficient steam engines), instruments such as steam gauges and engine indicators, clocks, watches, and infinitely more. That was the "flowering of New England" that the scripted lettering on the cabinet door of the Becker Brainard Mill seems to convey.

Thanks for posting your thread about the Becker-Brainard milling machine. Follow Thermite's advice. He is spot-on. Steel wool and something like penetrating oil and some scraping with either single edge razor blades or a dull scraper to peel off the rust will work wonders on the machined surfaces. I use an "India Medium Hard" oil stone to take down small burrs on machined parts. I have an assortment of small oil stones in various shapes and sizes, and these are quite handy for "stoning off" burrs without taking down surrounding metal.

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