DIYbanter - View Single Post - Burke Millrite Spindle Bearings Access Plug

In article ,
(rohamm) wrote:

(Dennis van Dam) wrote in message

It's amazing how tight you can fit up wood joinery when you gauge lengths
off to the nearest thou.

Isn't it though?

Using the mill for routing operations on smaller
wood working projects is something I'll be doing more of in the future and
you've got me looking at how best to mount my die grinder up to the
quill/head of the Millrite.

Dennis van Dam

We have a two century-old home in New England, and I save all the old
material
when we make any changes to it. The sub-flooring is called hard red
pine, and now it's
petrified, but man, it's beautiful. Now this is the stuff that was
too hard - lots of knots - to
plane smooth back then, but it's no match for a fly cutter on a
vertical mill.

With a name like "hard red pine" I'll bet it finishes to a very high
luster if so desired. What do you make out of it on the mill?

You really think that wood chips are bad for the ways? I clean them
off from
time to time, but they seem pretty harmless compared to steel.

I agree, I don't think a wood chip is going to do the physical damage a
metal chip would once it gets pinched between the saddle and the saddle
ways on the knee for instance, but I was given to understand it's the
resin that's leeched out of woodchips that's abrasive to the ways. I
have no idea how pronounced this effect is. I guess it depends on the
type of wood (resin) and how much exposure the machine realizes.

I grew up with a 9 inch SouthBend lathe in the basement and most of what
my father and I turned on it was wood and we never gave it a second
thought except maybe my dad emphasized keeping the machine wet with
lube. That lathe is now in my basement and I can't say it's any worse
for the wear having turned all that wood.

On the Millrite, I'm consciencious about keeping the wood chips (and metal
chips for that matter) clear because the saddle ways on the knee of my
Millrite are already pretty gouged up presumably (looks like) from metal
chips and insufficient lube. It was like that when I bought the mill.
Also it seems to me wood chips/dust permeate the nooks, crannies and
crevaces of the mill much more readily than metal chips do and there are
just more exposed machined bearing surfaces on the Millrite mill than on
the SouthBend lathe.

The other detriment caused by milling wood is that the wood chips/dust
tend to wick lube away from parts of the mill you want to keep wet with
lube. Of course the obvious solution for this is to lube the mill more
frequently when carving wood.

I was first told of the wood resin abrasion phenomena by a tool and die
maker who really knew his stuff. (Got his mechanical engineering degree
*after* a couple of decades working as a tool and die maker.) That fact
not withstanding, it does occur to me that there might be a wee bit of
"machinist arrogance" (uttered with the utmost of respect for the man and
the trade) embodied in the information, in that the purist machinist/metal
worker might be inclined to frown on using a mill to process wood, metal
working being more "technical", woodworking being more "craft", hence
processing wood on a machine tool is "an abuse" of the machine tool.

(But that last is just an impression, I'm still doing all I can to keep
the wood chips clear of the bearing surfaces on my mill.)

Dennis van Dam