Tramming in a sliding head mill

Is it possible to tram a mill with a sliding head? It's an old becker no. 3. The head slides on dovetails for drilling with a tapered gib to take up any slack, but as far as i can tell there's no way to adjust the tram.

I haven't checked it yet (it's pretty close, just not sure how precise) but I'm getting ready to build a new base plate for my lathe's tail stock (40s sb heavy 10) and that got my thinking about out of tram issues i may run into when cutting the vee on the back side.

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I personally would not worry about it. The tail stock base ways can be straighten up when you scrape and fit it to your bed and tail stock housing. Ken

And, speaking of scraping, that's the way you would "tram" such a mill (i.e. scraping the elements back into alignment, if needed).

Paolo

I had to go look up a pic of that machine. What a neat old beast. Its a really neat machine.

This is one of those "is what it is" situations. It was trammed in originally by the machine builder and here is no adjustment other than scrapping like Paolo says. I would personally adjust all the gibs and take some test cuts to make kind of a gauge block so you have an idea of how it cuts. Once you identify anything weird, the true source of accuracy (you) will be able to compensate.

Sorry for abandoning this thread - i didn't see anyone had replied until now!

Thanks for the input everyone! I was thinking that might be the case, but i thought I'd check to make sure. It really is a neat old machine. This one is definitely well worn though (not surprising for its age) so it definitely has plenty of baked in error to work around. The table is a litte loose for sure, and has a little bit of a hump/dip in the middle of the table travel based on my first few test cuts. Generally about +/-0.002 corner to corner over a few inches.

I'm not familiar with the "gage block" and compensations you're teferring to raven. Would you care to elaborate? I'm fairly new to using a mill and was under the impression i pretty much just had to live with whatever error i had with a machine this old, and scrape out whatever errors i couldn't tolerate

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