Free Cincinati Mill

A neighbor has a Cincinnati 28-120 Hydro-Tel vertical mill ( This guys twin brother Cincinnati 28-120 Hydro-Tel vertical mill - Greasy Machines ). He is not using it and is trying to get rid of it but does not want to allow a scrapper to take it. I said I would take it. Moving this machine is difficult at best at 38k lb It normally would require a lowboy and a crane for most. He said he paid a very pretty penny when he had it moved to his property. But I live next to the property where it rests. It has been placed on I-beam skids. I can drag the machine to my property with an excavator and put it under cover, It needs attention, but I think I can assemble a gantry to disassemble it piece by piece to inspect, clean and reassemble.

I have a heavy equipment background and looked at the hydraulics. They appear in good shape with healthy hoses. Still, I have seen hoses blow with no warning.

I understand this mill can copy parts with its hydraulic tracer. That would be pretty sweet to watch and learn to use.

Are there any manuals I can download to see how this machine works? What are the parameters this machine has to work within?

I don't have a lot of experience with machining and what I get myself into may be monumental, but I try to have fun and learn. I bought a Johansson 60 tapping drill press. I was hoping to find a Bridgeport I could learn with, but I may get Goliath to teach me...hopefully not kill me.

Anything I could expect from this machine? Good thing I have plenty of machine vices, though I need to make lots of clamps.

You could look thru this list of 120 or so pubs

Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. (Milacron) - Publication Reprints | VintageMachinery.org

Have fun

There is at least some coverage of Hydro-Tel in the 1951 edition of their A Treatise on Milling and Milling Machines. Look for the RED cover and slick paper

"Copy Parts" is way too simple. What it does is follow or trace patterns/models made for EACH OPERATION. A complex part could have dozens of patterns/models that would need to be made and dedicated - and set up

johnoder said:

You could look thru this list of 120 or so pubs

Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. (Milacron) - Publication Reprints | VintageMachinery.org

Have fun

There is at least some coverage of Hydro-Tel in the 1951 edition of their A Treatise on Milling and Milling Machines. Look for the RED cover and slick paper

"Copy Parts" is way too simple. What it does is follow or trace patterns/models made for EACH OPERATION. A complex part could have dozens of patterns/models that would need to be made and dedicated - and set up

Click to expand...

One of my brothers was a mold maker back in the 70's and they used Hydrotels a lot for cutting mold cavities.

$1 is a good price for an elephant.......If you have a dollar......and IF you want an elephant.

A Hydrotel is ridiculous as a first mill. Cool, but ridiculous.

I’m all for conserving industrial heritage and have 50 tons of hobby iron to prove it, but give this some thought before you drag a white elephant home.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

svs said:

$1 is a good price for an elephant.......If you have a dollar......and IF you want an elephant.

A Hydrotel is ridiculous as a first mill. Cool, but ridiculous.

I’m all for conserving industrial heritage and have 50 tons of hobby iron to prove it, but give this some thought before you drag a white elephant home.

Click to expand...

Ermmmm.. 3-8-Mike-Foxtrot-THOUSAND Avoir?

That heavy-hams bastid is a Helluva lot more like a steam-up-and-down rivetted Iron hull whaling SHIP than an elephant!

Given the least though to where to find POWER enough to even git it to raise its long-slumbering EYELID equivalents and beat-heart?

It surely don't run off no Duracell batteries.

Nor match modern CNC at the work it once dominated, either.

Now and then "obsolete" actually DOES mean "useless".

Just have a care to "keep your end up" so our wives don't find us out, willyah?

OH! I see how the Hydro-Tel works now. A pattern would have to be made. It is so interesting how one person could tell a story of a machine and another (me) see or "understand" it as something completely different. I knew it had to be more involved than he made it sound. That's okay, I like adventure and tinkering...my property has many of this type of items and adding more all the time. I am so happy my wife is understanding and sometimes even as curious as I.

Also, thank you for the lead on information on the mill.

thermite said:

Ermmmm.. 3-8-Mike-Foxtrot-THOUSAND Avoir?

That heavy-hams bastid is a Helluva lot more like a steam-up-and-down rivetted Iron hull whaling SHIP than an elephant!

Given the least though to where to find POWER enough to even git it to raise its long-slumbering EYELID equivalents and beat-heart?

It surely don't run off no Duracell batteries.

Nor match modern CNC at the work it once dominated, either.

Now and then "obsolete" actually DOES mean "useless".

Just have a care to "keep your end up" so our wives don't find us out, willyah?

Click to expand...

Yah, I'm not sure what I am going to do with it either, but I like projects.

As far as power...well, I live off-grid. Everything that batteries (Not by Duracell...though I do have some of their deep cell type) and inverters cannot handle get powered by generators.

While I really like the coolness and "OMG what are you going to make with that!", I also am a bit more realistic. I do research to see if it is "practical" to use as is. If not, I use parts that can be put to use as components in other machines, as other machines or to make parts for other machines. First thing after a bit of cleaning and adjusting, I want to use the table to as a surface grinding machine to make lathe bed(s) and any other long thing I need machines flat. The hydraulics could run, or even be, presses.

Even just studying how things are designed, for me, opens my mind to the how and maybe even the why of the way things use to be made and worked. I don't know everything, clearly, and I know that. That allows me to do things that people don't understand how to.

I could just cut it up to give monogrammed 1 pound paperweights to 38,000 people...saving me, at today's prices of $205/ton, $3,690!

svs said:

$1 is a good price for an elephant.......If you have a dollar......and IF you want an elephant.

A Hydrotel is ridiculous as a first mill. Cool, but ridiculous.

I’m all for conserving industrial heritage and have 50 tons of hobby iron to prove it, but give this some thought before you drag a white elephant home.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

I hear ya, I sometimes ready to visit the psych ward at the local hospital. But my wife assures me that if and when that time comes, she will drive me. I am not typing this from the hospital, so I am quite certain I am sane...for now.

Big B said:

One of my brothers was a mold maker back in the 70's and they used Hydrotels a lot for cutting mold cavities.

Click to expand...

I am more clear as to how this Hydrotel works now. It is like a sandbox. You give parameters for the machine to work within for different operations. Once an operation was complete, you give the machine a different sandbox. And so on and so on...until the part (mold) is complete.

Precursor to CNC?

aefriot said:

I am more clear as to how this Hydrotel works now. It is like a sandbox. You give parameters for the machine to work within for different operations. Once an operation was complete, you give the machine a different sandbox. And so on and so on...until the part (mold) is complete.

Precursor to CNC?

Click to expand...

"Made CNC necessary" might be more fair.

The creation of the templates for each grid subset was a "non-trivial exercise" in itself. Coordinating changes to each adjacent cell had to be a form of Hell.

Worse -it was "overhead" - as an intermediate process, not the final result sought.

ISTR Boeing was the first US firm to be able to afford enough computing power to make serious CAD/CAM a reality? Because it took an IBM MAINFRAME of the era to do the math in any sane amount of time.

Boeing ended-up IBM's largest-ever single "big iron" 'puter hardware owner/client.

Then went into bizness as "BCS" ..providing computing services in their own idle hours.

"puters grew better, faster, smaller, cheaper.. and CNC could go DIRECTLY to the output "metal" with its "templates" stored on ever-larger media big enough to not NEED all the "sub cell" and boundaries to be merged. Software did the whole lot, and seamlessly in a larger span.

So the "beast" is what one might class as "multiply obsolete" EG: on several metrics, not just the one.

Fun to run? Well. kinda like figuring a fish-farm is a good idea. Then picking the Blue Whale as your "product" instead of Tilapia?

Even if you can get enough Big Blue to cooperate?

Not cheap to house. Not cheap to feed!

And the whales are smart enough to take you for a pure fool!

Bitch-slap from a Blue Whale? Whole 'nuther UNIVERSE of hurt-locker!

You want to convert this puppy TO "CNC"? Run it off Linux?

I assure you it is "possible". So is economic suicide.

Pick any two.

The wider world has ALREADY replaced the function. "A while" ago.
Faster. And cheaper.

Be sure to install a "bed pan" under the machine with a sump pump. You will need it to recover all of the oil it uses from day to day operations. I recall my dad saying this. The place he worked at back in the late 1960's early 1970's, they had sever of them. I've been around a couple over the years, always a pool of oil on the floor around them. Dad said they were a nightmare to work on, too! You can never stop all of the oil leaks! Maybe with a truck load of Loctite, may stop the leaks!

aefriot said:

A neighbor has a Cincinnati 28-120 Hydro-Tel vertical mill ( This guys twin brother Cincinnati 28-120 Hydro-Tel vertical mill - Greasy Machines ). He is not using it and is trying to get rid of it but does not want to allow a scrapper to take it. I said I would take it. Moving this machine is difficult at best at 38k lb It normally would require a lowboy and a crane for most. He said he paid a very pretty penny when he had it moved to his property. But I live next to the property where it rests. It has been placed on I-beam skids. I can drag the machine to my property with an excavator and put it under cover, It needs attention, but I think I can assemble a gantry to disassemble it piece by piece to inspect, clean and reassemble.

I have a heavy equipment background and looked at the hydraulics. They appear in good shape with healthy hoses. Still, I have seen hoses blow with no warning.

I understand this mill can copy parts with its hydraulic tracer. That would be pretty sweet to watch and learn to use.

Are there any manuals I can download to see how this machine works? What are the parameters this machine has to work within?

I don't have a lot of experience with machining and what I get myself into may be monumental, but I try to have fun and learn. I bought a Johansson 60 tapping drill press. I was hoping to find a Bridgeport I could learn with, but I may get Goliath to teach me...hopefully not kill me.

Anything I could expect from this machine? Good thing I have plenty of machine vices, though I need to make lots of clamps.

Click to expand...

Someone can chime in and confirm: I think Boeing and some of the big aerospace subcontractors still use Cincinnati Hydrotels ?

If this is your first mill, that's a pretty extreme way to cut your teeth in the field.


@ John Oder
Would such a machine be a good candidate for grinding or planning machine ways ?

@ John Oder
Would such a machine be a good candidate for grinding or planning machine ways ?

Click to expand...

Seems to me that would be the worst sort of excuse for a FINISHING planer - if only from the maintenance and over kill power

I looked at pics in first link, looks to me like you could mount an engine block on table, surface it, swap tooling and bore it. There are some engine rebuilding machines($$$$) that look very similar.

dalmatiangirl61 said:

I looked at pics in first link, looks to me like you could mount an engine block on table, surface it, swap tooling and bore it. There are some engine rebuilding machines($$$$) that look very similar.

Click to expand...

A Corp of Engineers MIL-standard all-steel rock crusher looks "very similar" to G'Dad's mostly-hardwood late-1800's vintage flat belt drive 2-man tall 5,000-tree orchard apple-cider mlll too.

I've even run both.

But so far.. still know the difference and what each is GOOD at well over 50 years on!

Price a "crate" engine.

Or check with a first-tier recycler. $800 to $1,200 to mebbe $4,000, TOPS... for the 4.2L N/A Ford V8 as specifically fits my 2005 Jaguar XJ8-L. Because they came OUT of one.

Neither of those sources fits your need for a 1950's Kaiser sedan's Continental Red Seal six rebuild, a Lampredi or Columbo Fartfairy V-12, or an insanity-level-cubed Motown Big Block improved COPY ...as base for a go faster-faster-poorer?

There are others. Right here. On PM. PM has all of "antique-exotic", "antique-stoopidr" but collectible, and uber-performance-tomorrow-is-already-obsolete gurus you could ask for.

Without even ASKING, I'm safe in betting NONE of them would be caught within leaky-fluid range of a Hydrotel.

They simply don't NEED it to do their flavour of magic.

thermite said:

A Corp of Engineers MIL-standard all-steel rock crusher looks "very similar" to G'Dad's mostly-hardwood late-1800's vintage flat belt drive 2-man tall 5,000-tree orchard apple-cider mlll too.

I've even run both.

But so far.. still know the difference and what each is GOOD at well over 50 years on!

Price a "crate" engine.

Or check with a first-tier recycler. $800 to $1,200 to mebbe $4,000, TOPS... for the 4.2L N/A Ford V8 as specifically fits my 2005 Jaguar XJ8-L. Because they came OUT of one.

Neither of those sources fits your need for a 1950's Kaiser sedan's Continental Red Seal six rebuild, a Lampredi or Columbo Fartfairy V-12, or an insanity-level-cubed Motown Big Block COPY ...as base for a go faster-faster-poorer?

There are others. Right here. On PM. PM has all of "antique-exotic", "antique-stoopidr", and uber-performance gurus you could ask for.

Without even ASKING, I'm safe in betting NONE of them would be caught within leaky-fluid range of a Hydrotel.

They simply don't NEED it to do their flavour of magic.

Click to expand...

I was not thinking automotive engines, diesel is where the money is.

It can be made into one nice milling machine with huge movements, been running mine for 25 years now...Phil

Phil in Montana said:

It can be made into one nice milling machine with huge movements, been running mine for 25 years now...Phil

Click to expand...

Previous owner may have been doing exactly the same. Time marches on.

Could you, would you, restore & maintain, and/or "CNC" one ... vs other options and available contract or competitive resources ... and expect to even recover the cost of that - let alone even a slender profit..

THIS YEAR, though?

Or might a newer CNC or a simpler, older, but decent 3 to 5-inch "Bar" be a better general-work crust-earner? Prolly have such arredy?

Bloody bulky and heavy bastid to take the place of a loyal dog for a PET!
Specially of a freezing-hard winter night the heat goes out!

Dogs don't leak as much ... and fart even less often than wimmin', yah feed 'em proper-like.

Besides.. never did have a dawg slap two ice-cold feet right smack up onto my formerly warm bare a**!

I suspect it's the only reason wimmin' even bother to marry?

No complaints.

Works better than being born rich or good-looking!

Mine is cnc or manual, or copy cat or tracer, whats not to like???...Phil

Phil in Montana said:

Mine is cnc or manual, or copy cat or tracer, whats not to like???...Phil

Click to expand...

That I have no space - nor perhaps even POWER budget - for one HERE work for yah?



No dog, y'see.

I figure it is unfair to a dog to employ one and not provide the customary rude human child to teach loyalty to family and mannerly social behaviour to.

ANYBODY can shit on a carpet, steal from the butter dish and look guilty, or lick their arse and NOT look guilty just to dare you to do it better and more casually.

Dog has more important s**t to do as to tasking that humans do NOT do as patiently and professionally for being too long on emotion, too short on tolerance, and getting into vendettas and revenge that a Dog is too lazy to be bothered with keeping score on.

They delegate all that nonsense to their human domestic servants. Kitchen help, poop-scoopers, massage krew, and table waiters all look alike to a dog. But we smell different for each tasking, so that works for our time card.