Another thing I though was kind of stupid for them to do when they assembled the mill is to install one part upside down.
It's the clamping ring you see here at the bottom of the spindle column. In this picture it's right side up.
I assume they did it to give themselves a bigger bearing surface for the lower DRO mount. So I drilled and tapped a hole in the other side.
What is did was to make it harder to set the spindle depth with the knob you see at the bottom. With it upside down only
a small part of it protruded from the step in the clamp. Now it's fully exposed and a lot easier to use.
You might have noticed that I have the clamp as far down as it will go. This means I needed to add an spacer under the DRO mount.
I will show you why I did that at a later time. It's for something I will be adding to the machine.
This created another problem. The combination of flipping the clamp and and moving it down, now means that the threaded stop rod
is too short to give me the full travel of the spindle. It was actually too short to start with, not allowing you to use the indicator correctly.
You can see in this picture that the stop indicator is about 3/4" from the top. If I move it up any farther it unscrews off the stop rod.
This means that I will need to either make a longer stop rod or just add an extension piece at the bottom where it's not threaded.
The latter will be the simple way so I will do that.
I have a few more additions that will be adding to the mill and hopefully everything will be complete, making it an even more functional machine.
Gary