Ray's Portable Manual Mill Mods & Additions

[VB-Milling]

Wow Ray! Sooooooo jealous of that lathe!

I've got a good friend in his 80s and he runs the same lathe. It's an amazing piece of equipment and it sounds like you got a honey of a machine.

[RAYAR]

Wow Ray! Sooooooo jealous of that lathe!

I've got a good friend in his 80s and he runs the same lathe. It's an amazing piece of equipment and it sounds like you got a honey of a machine.

The price and condition and accessories was right, so I snagged it.
I found the manuals online as PDF files, service, maintenance and set-up and also operators manual, so I'm good to go. I was going over some things and familiarizing myself with it before I came home tonight. I unloaded it from my trailer this pm and set it up in it's place to be. Need to install a few lights and set up a tool board for its' accessories.

In its' location, shelf above is now cleaned off.


 

[RAYAR]

Well, about time I add to this thread. Tonight (Wed) I worked on profiling the cam on my auto band blade sharpener. I have it now profiled to my Kasko 7 degree blades. Just need to fine tune it a few thousands of an inch here and there to get the complete full grind. It's very close now and ran a couple blades through it while fine tuning. It was midnight by the time I packed it up.

Used a dremel with a small round head diamond burr to engrave info on outer side of blade next to splice. I figured this is a good way to keep track of blade info and number of sharpenings each band has.

Now to get some dull blades sharpened 8)

[RAYAR]

Last night, I set up the blade grinder again and did a little fine tuning. I then sharpened the rest of my Kasco blades, eight of them. As I was almost done with the 7th blade, sitting and watching it, I thought I noticed an unusual movement, a horizontal movement of the grinder head. That explains why there were some inconsistencies in the grinding, sometimes too heavy, sometimes too light. I temporarily shimmed it to do the last blade, it did better.

Tonight, I ended up shimming it with a more permanent shim. Ended up using a piece of banding strapping that measured 0.022" thickness. Seems quite snug now. Will see how it does next time I use it. Didn't realize or notice that there was that amount of horizontal movement in it.

The fun of fixing and modifying what someone else built. At least I have a piece of equipment to do a job.