Burke mill, Universal grinder (was Two New Machines)

Hello All!

It has been a long time since I have been on this Forum and I miss it. We are small organic farmers 100 miles north of Detroit. We have an antique machine shop.
I am 66 and my son is 31 and we both do a lot of work in the shop. We just got two new old machines, an old Burke Horz. Mill and a Universal Grinder. I would like to describe the machines we have now and ask the experts on this site what our new machines are used and if we could possibly use them.

We have a South Bend Lathe Mod. A,4ft. bed 3 and 4 jaw chucks and a tool post grinder, Hamilton Machine Tool Co. Lathe 10 foot bed,18in. four jaw chuck, 15in. three jaw chuck and a taper attachment. Surface grinder a Reid with a Parker Head, with a magnetic vice and a universal vise. A Shaper Cincinnati Machinery Co. A radial arm drill No. 5 morris taper. smaller drill press Edlund 1B No. 3 M.T. We have a super spacer a Brown & Sharp dividing head with all the plates and a rotatory table 16in. Also a Brown & Sharp Vert. Mill A-1 flat belt drive have all the collets.
My question is what can we use these two new machines for I am not a trained machinist. I learn over the years with books and trial and error. I will try to post pictures but have not done that yet on this post.

Randy

Create an account on Imgur: The magic of the Internet upload your pictures there and then post a BBCode link to them in your posts here. This is much easier to do and the images will be MUCH bigger. To get the BBCode, open you account, click on "images", click on the desire image and a bunch of links will pop up. Down toward the bottom you'll see BBCode. Click on that the link is copied into the clipboard. Switch back to your post on this forum and paste the link in your message.

Burke mills are mostly production mills with a small work envelope. Put an indexer on it and use it to cut gears. Start looking for B&S #9 taper tooling, arbors, end mill holders. Universal grinder, make tooling, your imagination and creativity are the limiting factors.

I found a good use for a universal grinder is to repair seal surfaces on shafts ,weld up with hardfacing ,and the grind smooth.With a bit of care you can also TIG weld up scored hardchromed hydraulic shaft and grind the weld back flush (generlly need to straighten first,after welding .)

The burke mill can be very handy if its suitably tooled. If you can get some collets for it then you can set up endmills, drills etc and use it for a variety of stuff. If it has screw feed on the table thats a win, otherwise you generally are limited to feeding the cutter all way thru and past the part, or to a stop to limit the travel (this sort of method would also work for cutting gears, not just shoulders). Back in the day you'd set up one of these with the part in a jig and stops on the table and the operator would load the part, feed to the stops, pull the part and so on. The machines were relatively inexpensive so you could set up a bunch of them for a series of operations and so produce a lot of parts. If you had to make 100 gizmos, working out some of the ops on a machine like this might save you some time vs cranking handwheels.

I renewed a bunch of lathe mandrels with a universal grinder, obviously they're now a bit undersize OTOH the taper is now usable...

Where do you live? I take it somewhere in the Thumb.

I live in Dearborn.

Hi,
We farm outside of Kingston. We do make food and have been busy lately, we take our foods to the Royal Oak and Eastern Market. We will be there Sat. I am in shed 3 at Eastern Market form 7am to 3
You could meet me there if you like.

Randy at Hampshire Farms

Randytheorgfarme said:

Hi,
We farm outside of Kingston. We do make food and have been busy lately, we take our foods to the Royal Oak and Eastern Market. We will be there Sat. I am in shed 3 at Eastern Market form 7am to 3
You could meet me there if you like.

Randy at Hampshire Farms

Click to expand...

Maybe after all this craziness subsides.

Nicely equipped shop...
New machine, the grinder might grind welded built up shafts. mill to mill keyways on shafts. With knowing how thread on the lathe and do simple mill and grinding works you might run an add on craigslist for one-ups and few-ups machining work wanted. cut off and thread pipes, make shafts and parts..likely bid $20 per hour or more,. might run into a low production job.