Clausing 8530 Restoration

Nice work. I'm restoring a 8530 model also. Mine was used in a carpenter shop so it was full of sawdust. All my bearings were shot. Ebay is my friend for bearings. The most expensive were the 2 lower spindle bearings. They are a matched set. I've been posting my purchase and progress in the bench mill section.
Mike
 
Nice work. I'm restoring a 8530 model also. Mine was used in a carpenter shop so it was full of sawdust. All my bearings were shot. Ebay is my friend for bearings. The most expensive were the 2 lower spindle bearings. They are a matched set. I've been posting my purchase and progress in the bench mill section.
I just read through your thread, lots of good info there regarding the head repairs. Thanks for sharing I'll be following along and taking notes for when I get to that stage. I started from the bottom and am working my way up. I've been meaning to post an update on my progress with this project.
 
Last edited:
I just read through your thread, lots of good info there regarding the head repairs. Thanks for sharing I'll be following along and taking notes for when I get to that stage. I started from the bottom and am working my way up. I've been meaning to post an update on my progress with this project.
Glad to help anyway I can. I just saw a Clausing 8520 for sale here in Calif on craigslist. I'm not sure what they are asking. I also have a Tree 2uv head that came off of another mill that I picked up. I was thinking of installing it on my mill. Clausing let you order different heads back when ours were made. You could get a Bridgeport M head or a Tree head and probably any thing else that was available at that time. The Tree 2uv was miles ahead of Bridgeport and Clausing. The 2 uv Tree quill is about as big as the Whole mill head on our Clausing mills. Really well made.
 
There's also an 8520 on Seattle CL right now, the guys is asking $4k he started at $5k on 12/20/22. My friend went and bought some other stuff from him and the seller said his highest offer so far was for $3800 but I think at that point he was still asking $4500. I'm curious to see where it lands, if he really had an offer at $3800 then I imagine it will be gone soon.

I'd heard of the Bridgeport M-Head conversions but never of the Tree head. I found some pictures of the Tree head, it does look burly. It seems to me like the MT2 on the Clausing is a bit of a limitation or at least it might limit tooling options. Then again i've read a lot of folks on the forum here don't find it to be an issue and I haven't seen many people doing conversions. I figure the engineers designed the rigidity of the machine around the limitations of the tooling available for MT2, so I question whether stepping up to a big gnarly head is really going to gain you that much.

I'm just going to run it as built, once I get it all painted and re-assembled, which I imagine won't be any time soon.
 
How did you pull off the knee? I need to replace all the knee bearings and that knee is a bit heavy. There has to be an easy way. I was thinking about removing the 2 allen head screws that hold the knee retaining plate to the knee.
Yours is looking great.
 
I just took everything off the knee, loosed the gib screws and lifted it up off the top. Then I set it down quickly! It's not light, but it wasn't terrible and I somehow managed not to hurt myself.

This photo was moments before the removal, except I think I removed the crank handle before the big lift.20221009_125840.jpg
 
Time for a long overdue update. As I mentioned previously, I felt the need to strip all the paint and derust the column, in order to do that I had to build a hot tank and a drusting tank.

Since these tanks were to live outside behind the shop and i intended to insulate the hot tank, an enclosure needed to be built to house them. I started with building a frame out of some lumber I had laying around.
20221024_141022.jpg

Then the enclosure was wrapped in a 1/8" plastic sheeting material.
20221026_115659.jpg

Since the large parts of the mill are too heavy to lift up into the barrels an overhead gantry was needed to afix a chain hoist.
20221024_141108.jpg

Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of the angle iron and pulley system which allows the chain hoist to slide back and forth. I could provide some close up photos in the finished state if anyone is interested. Otherwise here's the finished contraption in it's new home.
20230102_114529.jpg

For the hot tank I sourced a 55 gal steel drum with removable lid from someone on Craigslist. Here it is all wrapped up in it's blanket of R-13 that was left over from insulating the shop.
20221212_171302.jpg

Looking inside the barrel you can see the 5500w hot water heater element, the steel frame that was fabricated to protect the element and provide a platform to set things on while degreasing. Also note the ground stud around 4 o'clock and the k-type thermo couple probe around 6 o'clock. You can also just barely see the drain hole below the element, this leads to a ball valve outside the enclosure, this will be used to drain into 5 gal containers to be disposed of at the local hazardous waste disposal site.
20221212_171313.jpg

A dedicated 30amp circuit was run back to the waterproof enclosure for the control panel, which consists of a 50A 240v contactor for main disconnect (power on/off), a two position switch for controlling that contactor, a PID controller for temperature control of the hot tank and a solid state relay for pulsing the heating element on/off based on output from the PID controller.
20230102_114547.jpg

Now for the de-rusting tank. For optimal performance a cage style anode was fabricated out of 1/4" x 2" flat bar stock that was sourced from the estate sale where the mill was found. The round hoops are something like 18 gauge steel that were first run through the slip roller the welded to close the circle. The vertical bars were then bolted into place before welding, just to ease assembly.
20230102_111911.jpg

The electrolysis de-rusting tank needed to be plastic to prevent corrosion of the tank during the process. Luckily I had this blue barrel laying around, so I cut the top off and put the steel anode cage inside. A bulkhead fitting was installed in the bottom of the tank and ran out of the enclosure for disposal of the used electrolysis solution (washing soda).
20230102_114513.jpg

I don't have any photos of the lab style power supply hooked up but here's one of the tank bubbling away.
20230102_123428.jpg
 
I regret only being able to hit the "Like" button one time! Holy crap! You are "deep in" to this project! Love it.

Just wondering, but why not sandblast to remove rust and old paint?
 
I've wanted to try electrolysis for a long while now plus the storage tote I was using for degreasing is often too small, a hassle to drain and took to long to heat. So I was overdue for these tanks, plus there's many more greasy/rusty parts headed their way once the mill project is complete.

I do have a harbor freight sand blast cabinet that I commonly use for rust removal. It's not large enough for a lot of the mill parts. It would really only work for surfaces that get painted, any of the precision machined surfaces could not be blasted, so I'd be left using other rust removal methods of those pieces. Also, degreasing is still necessary before anything goes in the blast cabinet. I use it a lot for powder coat prep and cerakote prep, so grease and oil are strictly forbidden from my blast cabinet.
 
Back
Top