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My yard find Bridgeport tear down and clean up with plenty of photos

M K

Cast Iron
Joined
Feb 7, 2018
Hi

I have not been on this forum long but have found plenty of valuable info,

I do a lot of small and simple lathe work at home in my spare time, along with plenty of welding and fabrication work on various cars mainly for track use here in the UK and my day to day job is welder and fabricator for a company mainly making intercoolers and radiators and tanks etc for fast road cars and track cars

I have a Harrison M300 lathe that i got in quite a state and fully stripped, checked over, painted and put back together which is now a lovely machine, but i always wanted a nice Bridgeport to go with it even though i don't have the space for one at the moment

Anyway, about 2 months ago a lad at work mentioned a Bridgeport mill sat in his mates car salvage yard that used to be in a workshop but got put outside as it was in the way of the people renting the space who were not interested in it, i see 2 pictures of the mill and said it was a shame someone had put it outside to rot basically and now it was pretty much worth scrap money only but offered him £300 (about $420). I had not seen the mill and did not want to go and look at it either for that money, so he accepted the offer and i paid somebody another £200 ($280) to deliver it

So that is where it all starts, i know this is not a like new machine and i know it is worn but for the sort of work i do it will be fine, most of my jobs are boring, drilling and just skimming parts down for cars, there's nothing i do that requires tight tolerances, i am now over halfway through the tear down so i will add a few photos and keep posting until i am up to date

Thanks
Marc
 
Here is the photo i got of the Bridgeport before i made the offer, it had been sat outside in the terrible british winter weather for approx 6 months completely uncovered, it had seen plenty of rain wind and even snow before i stepped in and saved it

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Here it is being delivered to me when i actually see it for the first time

http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=223501&d=1521416146

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It also came with a vice that was looking very worse for wear and was seized solid

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time to get it inside, on my own and then start to see what i have actually bought:D
 

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I have been walking by some road work for the last week. They have used plastic sheets to cover mounds of fill dirt. The sheets are folded so that the thickness is x4. Why are so many BP's stored outside treated less than fill dirt?
 
i know exactly what you mean, i can't see why they would not of covered it up but it was left completely open to the elements
 
when i got it indoors, i made up a skate with 6 castors to be able to move it about on my own as i don't have anybody here to help me

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Before i had it moved the X axis motor had been badly bent unfortunately, i assume when it was moved outside previously

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The quill itslef seemed to be in nice condition and although the table etc was rusty and the ways were very grimy and had surface rust, all the handles moved and the table and sadle and knee all moved as they should, albeit a bit stiff, there was no obvoius slop or play in the table when physically trying to twist it etc so heres hoping its not that bad
 
That actually doesn't look too bad from what can be seen in the pics. Plus it has a powered Y axis, which is rare (at least here in the states). Hopefully it's not too worn. I think a "mere" 6 months outside might not be too hard on it. And even if it ends up being a glorified drill press, a drill press is an extremely valuable tool. A glorified one, even more so.

Best of luck, looks like a good score to me. Especially the rigging + delivery fee - that's very cheap where I live and I live in a place where petrol is £0.45/liter.
 
at first i did not realise the Y axis powerfeed was so rare but it seems even over here in the uk it is very rare indeed, this one runs 1 Quinton crane board which is the same as the erskine and then uses a chngeover board to swap between the x and y axis powerfeed,

It was a real shame the x axis powerfeed motor was damaged as they are hard to come by and a new 1 is around £750 ($1050)
 
Started to strip it down and soon found that the bad weather and rain meant that any oil or grease had turned to mayonaize and gunk and it had also gotten to the spindle bearings quite bad

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Spindle top bearing

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Spindle main bearings had also suffered and were beyond usable which i expected to be honest so no real surprise there

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Motor removed and top parts of the upper head off and cleaned up,

At this point i had ordered the spindle rebuild kit and the 1.5hp rebuild kit from H&W machine repairs in the states

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Carried on stripping everything down

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The bent X axis motor that i straightened on the lathe but the actual part around the shaft has been squashed and it runs out of true and jams up against the windings in the case when i put it back together so unfortunately its scrap

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Cleaned up the 3 phase coolant pump which worked fine, this has a dual voltage motor so will be re configured to run from a vfd as well as the main motor (not from the same vfd)
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Unfortunately neither the X or the Y axis powerfeeds worked at all so i needed to delve into that a bit deeper later on and see whats what with the help of some people from this forum
 
I know you think this is special, but you are about 1,000 on the list of "I saved a BP".
I hate to sound cynical, but I can't recall the last time that I saw the finished product.
JR

BTw, this post should be in the machine rebuilding section. We've seen it all before here.
 
I took the vise into work and cleaned it up using the polisher and a few different grade scotchbrite mops and it come up lovely, this item itself is probably worth half the money i paid for the mill

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Hi

I am under no illusion that this is special at all so do not know what you mean? i was just sharing my work and tear down with everyone on here as this is what i thought these sort of forums are for???

My photo's and experience taking this apart considering i have never touched or seen a Bridgeport before in person may help someone else who is looking to do the same thing who also has no experience with them

If there is no interest in this and its just me that thinks this is special as you say then i will not waste mine or anybody else's time and you can go ahead and delete the thread

Thanks
Marc
 
I have seen myself many people that never finish projects, be it cars or machines or general diy, but i always have and always will finish what i start, thats just how i am, whether it takes days weeks months or years i do not go back on what i say i will do with anything,
 
I had a search through old posts and it seemed that 90% of post in the restoration section was to do with scraping etc and not general tear down and rebuilds so i thought it would be better kept in the actual Bridgeport section
 
Marc,
I'm just saying that it's all been done a bunch of times before. There are more picture of torn appart BPs than I can count. What I'd really like to see is the finished product. Like I said, I can't remember the last time that I saw somebody actually finish their milling machine. I'm open for corrections it I am mistaken, but it's been a long time.

Here's what I go by, Kay Fisher's rebuild: Bridgeport Mill Rebuild By Kay Fisher | The Hobby-Machinist Forums
Do a job like that and I will be really impressed.
JR
 
I know you think this is special, but you are about 1,000 on the list of "I saved a BP".

When it's your first one it damned well is special. You go from zero to milling capability, and that amount of sweat equity is a more valuable experience than a formal apprenticeship. MK, good on yer.
 
JR - of course there is a million photo's of these things torn apart, they are now very old and there is lots of them about so i know in the grand scheme of things these kind of threads are all much the same

None the less i will carry on with the thread and you can see how it fares in the end when i get to the finished article.

I will state now though that this is a complete tear down, replacement of broken parts, full clean, re paint and then re assemble. I am not going to get into scraping ways and scraping in new gibs, the machine is old and does have plenty of wear in some places but it was far from sloppy and for my use as said before will be pretty much a glorified drill press that can hold the type of bigger parts i sometimes need to drill, i don't actually do any real milling and have never used a milling machine before but i like to learn and if i did need anything complicated i have access to a brand new XYZ cnc milling machine that we got in work this week, and a mate who is trained to use cnc mills as id have no idea where to start
 








 
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