Deckel mt4 to sk40

I’m sure this question has been talked about, my search returned no answers so sorry in advance..

I have a mid-late 50’s fp1 with mt4 spindles. Wondering if it’s possible to convert to the sk40 by simply replacing the spindle shaft? Are they interchangeable?

Thanks

Kyle

I do not think so Better replace the whole angle head Or the quill maybe Although you may end up adjusting the bore/quill fit These can be found used A shaft is harder or even impossible to find used And then you have to get the right selected needle bearings
But what about the horisontal spindle then
Perhaps sell this machine and buy a SK40 Cheaper probbably if you have to buy the parts from Singer

Peter

Peter, thanks for the input. I’m not too worried about or interested in changing the horizontal as I don’t use it much. As far as selling goes the deckels seem to be hard to find in the US, I was lucky enough to find this one 6 hours from me.

Thanks

Carbon Works said:

I’m not too worried about or interested in changing the horizontal as I don’t use it much.

Click to expand...

Have you used a Deckel-style mill before? When I first got mine I mostly used the vertical spindle, but after a few years the horizontal gets just as much use. That seems to be the experience of many people who get these mills for the first time.

Here I am in horizontal mode, cutting slots in a cast-iron lapping plate.

Owning a 1960ish FP1 with MT4 spindles, I totally feel your pain. (The machine gets used by various students of milling - I bought it because it was cute, turned out to serve a variety of real purposes. There are threads about it under my user name - including a discussion of tooling.)

OK. so what would I suggest you try?

Find some MT4-Collets. Yes, collets. They show up in a funny set (one or two sizes missing) on ebay and various other places. Remove the factory drawbar and make one with a standard male thread that fits the collets.

Now, take the collet that fits the shaft of a tormach TTS style tool (I think it's 1/2" - I could check if you care.) - and grind it down to minimize how much sticks out of the spindle.

And suddenly, there's a pretty good supply of tool holders (TTS style) that fit your machine, are quick to change, and come in standard usful configs like drill chucks and ER collet chucks (that are ER16 or ER20 instead of the bizarre ER40 things you see on ebay.) All of this consume little Z-height.

Nothing is permanently altered if you don't want it to be.

Think its lots more practical to fit a more use able collet setup to your existing MK4 tapered spindles.

Changing the spindle i think would be very problematic....First off likely your machine has plain bushing spindle bearings.
All the 40 taper spindles to the best of my knowledge have needle roller bearings...requiring a different quill from what you have.

Further don't have a clue if you could change the quill complete...but that introduces the actual fit of the quill to the housing......
Could find another vertical head with a #40 taper, but as Peter points out there is the matter of your horizontal (a real reason for having a Deckel in the first place) ...

So much easier to go this route....
Spannzangenfutter MK4 S20x2 ER32 im Holzkasten z.B. fur Deckel Frasmaschine

Will work on both spindles, no modifications needed....easy tool change, large range of sizes avaliable....
Will hold from 2 to 20MM tools....

Cheers Ross

Hi to all,

TTS shank is 3/4" IIRC and can, indeed, make your life a bit easier for smaller tools.

But a MT4 ER collet chuck will help for real work, as Ross suggested, as will direct MT4 collets for Deckel (or generic ones if you want to replace the drawbar).

I think you can also find horizontal arbors for not so much money when it comes to MT4, and they can be modified to fit the original drawbar.

I lived for 2 years with an MT4 FP1 copy (ALG 100) and didn't have any real tooling issues. It was mostly ER32, 355 collets and shell mills for me.

Plus, due to the plain bushing, you have a real workhorse of a spindle there. As nice people here have suggested, plain bushings don't really care about interrupted cuts or pushing too hard. Not that you have to do all that but it's relaxing to know the spindle is really tough.

BR,
Thanos

I have a lathe that has MT3 spindle and it came with collets from 3 to 20mm, which are similar to E355. I made my own adapter and drawbar for it that fits to MT4 and I use the collets on my FP1, there is very little runout and I could get even better results with some grinding but never needed, fits to my needs and did not have to get any extra collets or so. Additionally I have some MT4 collets they are called direct collets in German, from China, and they do work quite well also.