Newbie and the Bridgeport

[Ceej0103]

Hey all,

Just found the community a few weeks ago and the guidance has been top notch. My short story is I've always been fascinated with the manufacturing process (I actually own an IT Engineering firm....boring). After about 9 million episodes of How It's Made on YouTube, I landed on machining videos. Specifically, This Old Tony. I had a fair amount of carpentry experience, but wanted to build things from metal. Anything and everything. I also wanted to weld. So that's where it began. First purchase was an old transformer TIG machine. I clocked about 50 hours of practice in the first month. Mild steel, stainless, and aluminum. Cool...now I'm an 'ok' welder.

Next was an auction where I was able to pick up a benchtop mill and a small 9x20 lathe. That was about 3 months ago. After 2 months and 3-4 week-long projects, I knew I wanted to go bigger. I saw a Bridgeport and a Jet 1340 lathe sitting in the dark basement of a food processing plant. They were in rough shape...I was hoping pictures made them look worse than they were. Yep, I was wrong. They're rust buckets. But generally all the moving parts were free.

So I drove the 3 hours to the factory and had them set on my trailer, strapped them down tight, and hauled them back to Holly Springs, NC. I'm working out of my 2-car garage and the Bridgeport was sitting in the middle of it. So by virtue of not wanting to walk around it for a month, I decided it was going to be my first target. So here's the pictures of the machines as they sat:

New Hobbyist with some TLC-required Machines

Hello everyone, After watching This Old Tony and Abom79 for about 200 hours on YouTube, I decided it was a hobby I would enjoy. So I jumped in head first. My current lathe and mill include an unknown make 9x20 lathe (only identifying marking says CF-918) and what I think is referred to as a...

www.hobby-machinist.com

And here's some pictures (at the end of the thread) after everything was torn off and laid out.

[Solved] Moving the Ram

EDIT: I was able to find the answer with a few quick youtube searches. I have a broken lever. Was just going to delete this thread but cant find the option to do that. Also found a bunch of content on freeing a stuck ram, which seems to be what I'll be doing for the next several days. Time...

www.hobby-machinist.com

And now the re-finishing/re-building journey begins. I'll post in this thread as I move through that process.

 

[pontiac428]

You sure got a nice start in learning the hobby- those are great machines to get going on. I am sure they will clean up nice. Now get started, you have a lot of chips to make!

 

[Ceej0103]

So I just posted that initial introduction, but didn't want to slam it with too much information in the first post. So I'm writing a second one to update the progress thus far. We'll call this Day 3 as Day 1 and 2 were the teardown.

So here we go, Day 3. I got the column moved out in to the driveway and carefully lowered it down on it's side. When moving the machine around initially it had a ton of black crap coming out of the bottom. Very fine crap. How the heck would that have got there? When I tipped it, it dawned on me that it was casting medium used when originally casting the column. Wonder how old that stuff is. The bottom was super rusty so I hit it with the ol' Dewalt cordless angle grinder, a wire wheel, and a 60v battery. I cant say enough about that Dewalt angle grinder with the 60v platform. It's a workhorse. It's not the best de-rusting job I am capable of doing, but I'm going to hit it with some of that magical "heavily rusted" oil-based primer. A couple coats should get the bottom in good shape. And it won't see the moisture it did in that food processing plant, so I think that should be good enough.

I also had the chance to start to clean up some of the parts. I've decided to keep all the small stuff from the same 'regions' of the machine together in ziplock bags after they're cleaned and lightly oiled to avoid any surface rust while they want to go back in. I'm de-greasing and hitting what isn't a machined surface with the wire wheel on the bench grinder. Before they go back in to the machine, I plan to polish everything up for that nice slip-and-slide finish.

Tomorrow, I'm going to prime/paint the under-side of the column, and then stand it up to apply some paint stripper and get the entire column ready for prime/paint. From there, I'm moving up to the turret and then ram. With those three pieces restored and assembled, I'll place the machine in it's location and bolt on items as they are restored. I'm contemplating those nifty outrigger leveling feet that I saw on an H&W video.....anyone have them??

 

[Nutfarmer]

You are off to a good start

 

[Dabbler]

Well, you sure have your work cut out for you... But you are starting with machines that have great bones.

A friend of mine got a Clausing 13 40 that sat in the rain for 2 years (in Ontario), with a seized headstock. After a bunch of elbow grease and a couple hundred$ in parts, he has one sweet lathe! Hang in there - both of those machines have the ability to do great work once restored.

 

[hwelecrepair]

Lookin good. As far as how things got there, you would be shocked at the things we find in Bridgeports when we tear them down to rebuild them.

Jon

 

[Ceej0103]

Day 4...

My primer got dropped off this morning so I took a short break from pawing on my keyboard to go outside and put two coats on before lunch. This primer for 'heavily rusted' metal works great....the stuff sticks like fly paper. After that set up, I put a coat of black on it just to do it. I wasn't going to paint it and just leave it primed, but I had to take it the extra mile. Was a dumb idea to be honest. Not only is it still tacky (3 hours later), my wife decided to do some flower bed work while it was drying and now it has grass particles stuck to it. Oh well...it's the bottom. Lesson learned, do the rest of the painting in the garage.

I also wanted to see how this paint remover was going to work so I decided to hit the top face as an experiment. It sucks. Either it's a bad paint remover or this thing has some decent base coating/priming from back in the day that the remover just can't penetrate. I wanted to avoid hitting the whole thing with the angle grinder as I hate making that mess in the driveway, but that's going to be my solution. Wire wheel it in to submission. I'll start that tomorrow after the bottom is dry and I can stand it back up.

Lastly, I did some clean-up of the knee way that was face up. I think they'll clean up nicely, but it's going to take a bunch of elbow grease. I'm finding that a green scotch brite and purple power degreaser aren't going to take it to the finish line. The built up debris down in the scraped areas (i think this is called checking??) just wont lift out. I resorted to using some carb cleaner and a red scotch brite. It started to make a difference, but more work to be done.

 

[hwelecrepair]

@Ceej0103 Looks like your wear seems pretty uniform across your ways. Flaking marks dont look gone in some spaces. Awesome.

Be careful with scotch brite and too much elbow grease. Depending on the accuracy you have/want, this could effect that. That is the downside of flaking exposed ways like that, crap gets in them and it will/could transfer to the underside of your saddle ways.

Jon

 

[Ceej0103]

@Ceej0103 Looks like your wear seems pretty uniform across your ways. Flaking marks dont look gone in some spaces. Awesome.

Be careful with scotch brite and too much elbow grease. Depending on the accuracy you have/want, this could effect that. That is the downside of flaking exposed ways like that, crap gets in them and it will/could transfer to the underside of your saddle ways.

Jon

Is there a safer way to do it? Maybe microfiber and a lot of solvent to basically dissolve the crap?

 

[Dabbler]

@Ceej0103, I use a stiff toothbrish and solvent to clean my ways. Cheap and effective. If it is really gummy, then white scotchbright with very light pressure is occasionally required - but only as a last resort time saver.