Milling the milling table.....

I don't think you'd be able to machine the whole surface of a milling machine in one pass. The travel won't allow it.
My shaper table on the other hand was a couple thou high away from the apron. It can machine itself and did a great job. same as grinding the magnet on a surface grinder.

Greg
 
Since my mill is a column, I could swing it to either side and reach both sides, however, I'd have to loosen and swing the head to reach the adjacent side, likely losing any and all accuracy.

This was just a thought. I'm not gonna risk ruining the table.
 
I just today watched a couple YouTube videos , with mill tables being machined on a planer . Even the underside v cuts. It can be done with the right machines . If it were my mill I'd get some metal filled epoxy or plug the holes and machine them off to the table. ?
 
+1 on the metal filled epoxy,
then you could hand scrape the highspots with a homemade scraper made from an worn file, if you were so inclined

i wouldn't resurface the table with the mill it is attached to, any alignment error will be transferred to the work.
ideally it should be ground to maintain parallelism
 
Filling any damage, drill holes, etc and smoothing it back would probably be a better way to go, But if you were determined to experiment you could always attach an aluminum plate across the entire table an have a go at it as a dummy run. Countersink some machine screw in the plate so it is held down evenly over the entire surface, and if you used a large enough fly-cutter and had it perfectly trammed you may be able to do the entire table with just the X travel and no need to reset the head.

You would get an idea of how much the table was tilting as the overhang changed by the realitve depth of cut on the leading and trailing edge of the fly-cutter as you traversed the table (i.e as it tilts the flycutter will be cutting deeper on the high side). And in the end you can then check the flatness of the finished plate and decide if that would be an improvement or not. All without doing any further damage to the actual table if it doesn't work.
 
Unless some of the dings are large enough to swallow a vice, I would just lightly stone the table to knock down any raised edges on the ding marks and not bother with filling them in or refinishing the entire table surface. Besides, a few dings (that have been stoned flat) give it character. ;) ymmv

Tom
 
I saved some cast iron machining dust for later use. One can mix JB Weld or similar with cast iron powder to make a paste. This mixture
works well for filling imperfections on mill tables like drill holes and crashes and the like. My Gorton mill had a couple milling marks
on the table that were fixed this way. The repaired area can be filed and or sanded and the imperfections become quite unnoticeable.
Most dings and dents are only cosmetic really. It's a good idea to have a diamond flat hone (like a red DMT 2" x 6") to stone off any minor
high spots that occur with normal use. I stone off my table whenever I remove the vise or add the rotary table. Also, I have learned
to use some aluminum table covers for the unused parts of the table and that helps reduce these dings from occuring.
 
Yeah, the table is fine, I just hate how it looks. Every metal surface that isn’t painted has that aged brown oiled metal look. Not shiny and new...
 
Low spots cause no real issues on a table if they are not big enough for the part or tooling to fall into. And even that can be dealt with by using a spacer plate. High spots can (and should) be lightly stoned to remove the burrs. Precision ground flat stones are the best way to do it. Ignore the "character and history" that previous (hopefully!) users left for you. The real goal is beautiful parts, not beautiful machines. Machines are a means to an end -- for machinists who want to make stuff...
 
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