New mill Wells-Index 745

dmittz

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I had been wanting a milling machine for a while now.

It is hard to find a good mill in B.C Canada. After 1.5 years of watching craigslist I found a wells-index 745 down in washington state in a custom motorcycle shop. Previous owner had it for many decades and said it was used a few times a year as a back-up to thier main mill, I think the owner purchased from a custom car shop in california who he thought bought it new. which meant it never did production work and was proabbly lightly used.

I called wells index before puchasing it and they confirmed it was a 1hp 3ph, R8 spindle, Sold feb 4, 1969.

I ran it for 30-40 min and everything worked good. Only issue I noticed was a little backlash in the X axis about 20thousands. Table, and knee seemed smooth and tight along full travel. They also included a vise, hold downs and some cutters.

Thankfully the motorcycle shop had a huge crane to load it in our truck.

My father inlaw and I transported it back to Canada in his truck then used his forklift and palet jack to unload it into my workshop. Suprisingly the move was actually not that hard at all.

I am pretty excited to finally have a Mill.

I took the table and knee off for cleaning and discovered although, it was not very dirty that the oil ports had been greesed :(

The good part is all of the precision surfaces look excellent. Since I had to clean out all the oil ports anyway, the plan in to dismantle, repaint, clean, replace the XY nuts and reassembal.

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It was worth the wait. Index mills are great machines. Congrats!
 
Thanks Chuck K, I'm very happy with it. Really cool that wells-index still supports all their machines too.
 
Hi everyone,

Thought I might update this thread a bit and show the work I've started doing on the Mill.

So as mentioned I discovered that one of the previous owners had had greesed the oil ports, so before I started using it I thought I'd better dismantle it and clean out all of the oil passages etc... Also I hate the color so I'm going to do a full on strip and repaint while its apart. I will also fix anything else that I find is worn/broken. I likley won't touch the ways as they look ok and I really never forsee myself needing extreme percision so a little wear is ok with me.

First step was to start removing the table and taking apart the knee...

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Removing the table wasn't to hard. I Cranked it all the way to the one side, removed the lead screw then pulled it off the saddle and carried it to a rolling cart and set it down the table is actually not as heavy as it looks.

Both the X and Y lead screws are in excellent shape with no noticable wear.

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The ways on bottom side of the table also seem pretty nice. scapings still visible along the whole length. Its a little hard to see in the picture because the lighting was not great.
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Next up I removed the saddle:

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Lots of old greese clogging up the oil ports on the saddle. So I cleaned them out throughly.

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The saddle did seem to have a bit of wear.on thw ways where it rides on the knee, proabbly from the greese instead of oil. I doubt it will matter much for my purposes as I really don't need extreme precision.

On the other side of the saddle however it was a different story, the scraping was relatively intact with some wear near the ends...
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Next up was removing the knee. I used and engine hoist, when I put it back on I will need to figure out a way to rig it up so I can stop it from wanting to tip forward.
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The ways on the top of the knee have some wear but it doesn't seem that bad to me.

The Z axis ways look perfect.

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I bought 5 gallons of purple power, as I was going to need to do some serious cleaning!

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I mixed up the purple power 3 parts water to 1 part PP and filled up a large rubbermaid bin and let some of the smaller parts soak in it for an hour or two. Darned it it didn't clean them right to bare metal. Jackpot!

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As soon as each part came out of the purple power bath they got a through solvent wipe down which seemed to prevent much flash rust and preserved the most of the parts in thier bare metal state. Anything that tried to flash rust got put in an evapo rust bath in another runner maid bin until the rust was gone.

I was really happy how nice the first batch of parts came out. Too bad I can't use this method for the coloum and knee!

More Updates to come.
 
Looking good! Your ways look a whole lot better than mine did!
 
I did much the same thing to an Index mill once. Keep in mind that the pedestal has a lot of body filler on it to smooth out the casting (At least mine did). I ended up removing all of the filler and just painted the rough casting. It still looked good to me, but certainly wasn't as smooth as a new machine. I only mention this because it's really easy to get into the filler when you're scraping layers of paint off. Nice job. It's going to be a keeper.
 
Thanks for the very sound advise Chuck. Ya they really put a lot of filler on these things, and that stuff was hard to get off! I did end up stripping the coloum and knee down to bare metal and it was a ton of work but came out good so far.
 
Next up it was time to deal with the knee. I carried the knee outside and began degreesing it with purple power and a pressure washer.

I wasn't able to get the quill dial etc... off the knee and I didn't want to get to aggressive and break something so I let it in place and covered it up well.

Once the knee was clean I used an aircraft paint stripper to remove 2 layers of paint and some sort of 'body filler'.

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After that the knee was now bare metal so I immediately gave it a solvent wipe and left a space heater blowing on it. That worked well as I didn't get any flash rust before painting.
 
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