A1S (7x30) mill parts questions

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chasz

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I just brought home an A1s style mill that appears to be identical to the Select mills that I have seen on this site. Also similar to the 8x30 mills from Enco, Grizzly, etc. This mill seems very nice and has been cared for by only one perso it’s entire life. It does have metric dials which simply good justification for DRO.
The mill appears to have a MT3 spindle and came with set screw holders in a variet of sizes. I’m wondering if it would be worthwhile (or even work) to replace the spindle with R-8 from grizzly or Harbor Freight (6x26) since the parts manuals appear to be identical. Maybe someone has been down this lathe and can chime in?
Anothe item is that this mill is missing the fine feed for the spindle down feed. It has the lever for the quill but there is a blank plate where the fine feed would be. I’m thinking that the Grizzly G1004 parts would be the same (and maybe the HF 6x26h. I’m not sure I really need the fine feed. But if I can find the parts for a decent price, maybe I should install them while parts are still available. Has anyone else looked into this?
Oh, I also satisfied my need for American iron with the D40 Kurt vise that came with the mill.
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Wow, next time I’ll remember to spell chek before I post!
 
I would be concerned that newer parts would be different in some way that you are not able to easily correct.
They changed design on these things at will and often parts were not interchangeable across factories.
You might want to pull the spindle and take important measurements and then see if a member owning the "donor" machine would be willing to do the same.
I have the Rockwell mill with R8. Unfortunately parts have been unobtainium for 20-30 years but it works pretty darn good...
 
Thanks for your reply. It does make sense that newer parts might be slightly different. (It is a 45 year old mill after all). Maybe I should just run the mill for a while to see if I’ll miss the fine feed and R8 spindle.
 
A couple more thoughts...

If your current spindle is not tight consider rebuilding it, using precision angular contact bearings on the bottom and preloaded (shimmed) ball bearings on the top. I have a writeup on doing this on the Rockwell, yours is probably similar:
www.hobby-machinist.com

Rockwell 21-100 Spindle Rebuild

Re-posting after server crash issue... I recently acquired one of these vertical mills, and will be rebuilding and refinishing it as time permits. Most of it is still in pieces, but I managed to just complete the spindle rebuild. I leveraged some ideas posted on the Yahoo Rockwell Milling...
www.hobby-machinist.com www.hobby-machinist.com

They do make MT3/ER32 adapters, if you want a more complete range of collets. I do see that they are making MT3 collets for reasonable prices (imports).
 
Thanks again. So far the spindle seems tight and the bearings quiet. I like your post. Well documented and informative, and a very nice looking machine.
 
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