- Joined
- Feb 7, 2014
- Messages
- 350
Quite a few years ago I finally managed to save up enough to buy a little HF mill. I had no illusions about the quality I was getting. Getting was way better than not getting at all. The ways were warped so that several inches of travel wouldn't travel. I lived with it for years, being creative about work piece sizes. A year or so ago I hung stepper motors on the little mill to do CNC. That made made the problem unworkable. Years of using nothing but the center of the table had aggravated the original problem with wear. CNC meant that I couldn't selectively lock one axis or the other, or do gib adjustments on the fly. So the machine saw little use. The sale of some of my other toys and a deal with my wife got me a larger mill/drill. I considered converting it to CNC, but I like the feel of manual control. It did occur to me that the mill/drill was just large enough to re-machine the X2's ways.
Two weeks ago I got up the nerve to mill the X-axis table and saddle. Not being very patient, I assembled the table and saddle with the old gib. It slide smoothly from end to end with no wobble. I was very pleased with myself, but all was not well. Wear marks from the first slides showed that I had very little bearing surface. If I don't do something to smooth the ways, I will quickly be back to where I started. I have spent hours reading rancorous discussions on the net about the merits of lapping versus scraping.
Enough of boring you with background. I think I want to scrape the ways, and I think that I have a plan. Assuming that I can teach myself to scrape, this is it.
Saddle
Two weeks ago I got up the nerve to mill the X-axis table and saddle. Not being very patient, I assembled the table and saddle with the old gib. It slide smoothly from end to end with no wobble. I was very pleased with myself, but all was not well. Wear marks from the first slides showed that I had very little bearing surface. If I don't do something to smooth the ways, I will quickly be back to where I started. I have spent hours reading rancorous discussions on the net about the merits of lapping versus scraping.
Enough of boring you with background. I think I want to scrape the ways, and I think that I have a plan. Assuming that I can teach myself to scrape, this is it.
- Machine a cast iron dovetail master.
- Scrape in the master.
- Use the master to scrape in the bearing flats
- Use the master to scrape in the table dovetail ( or should it be the saddle first?).
- Scrape the saddle to the table.
Saddle