New to me Benchmaster up and running

Though it won't win any beauty contests it's now very clean, the bearings have been cleaned/resealed/adjusted, it's level and it's tuned up. It seems to run well. I'm really looking forward to using it more.

Tinkertoy1941, your Benchmaster looks super nice. Any suggestions for me?

Jeff, that Industro-Lite looks very similar in design to the Benchmaster, just heavier. Does it have a vertical head too?

Andy
 
Welcome I like these little mills.

When I was looking for a small-ish mill bigger than my Sherline I had an eye out for one of these as an option. I didn't find one at a price I could agree too. Small mills like these, Atlas and the little Burke mills are popular which can make them surprisingly expensive.

If you do Facebook, a Benchmaster group started up a few moths ago. Not real busy but there are a couple of people doing some interesting things with theirs.


I've got a WW2 era Diamond horizontal mill which is related through a corporate marriage. The last evidence of the Diamond Tool Company shows it as a division of Benchmaster in the early 1970s. Both companies also made punch presses and that was probably the target for Benchmaster, because I've not found anything to show that they ever put any of the Diamond mills back into production.


mill1.jpg
 
I would love to find one of those!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Anyone out there have an extra dial or two (P/N 3725)? Seems at some point in this mill's life they were polished and now it's really hard to read the graduations.

Overall the mill's working well and I used it to make some parts to repair the old Dunlap drill press I picked up :).
 
ashyers said:
Anyone out there have an extra dial or two (P/N 3725)? Seems at some point in this mill's life they were polished and now it's really hard to read the graduations.

Overall the mill's working well and I used it to make some parts to repair the old Dunlap drill press I picked up :).
Click to expand...

You could make some dials.
 
Now those are some cool machines. :encourage:
Wish I had found something like that years ago when space was limited.

Per @Nogoingback's suggestion here's a current thread on shop made dials. Go ahead and go big now you'll need them later.:grin:
www.hobby-machinist.com

Clown shoe sized lathe dials

My SB 10 has a 1" dial on the compound and 1-1/4" on the cross slide and I've always wanted larger dials. So I made new dials using the dividing head to do the graduations. Worked out ok, new dials are 2.25" and 2.5" which are clownishly large but easy to read as there is plenty of room between...
www.hobby-machinist.com www.hobby-machinist.com
 
I'll read over the info. I'm not sure how I'll deal with the graduations, maybe it will give me some ideas.

EDIT: Read it over, now who has some ideas on how to do this without a dividing head?

Andy
 
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