Has anyone built a special stand for a small horizontal mill like an
Atlas, Burke or Benchmaster?

I would like to have a stand with storage for the tooling and
accessories that go with the horizontal mill.

Any ideas as to how you would customize a base for a horizontal mill?

What is the list of accessories that the base would need to store?
Cutters in particular take up alot of space.

I would think that a small shaper, drill press or grinder would also
benefit from a customized base also.

Any suggestions, pictures or ideas?

Thanks

TMT

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Has anyone built a special stand for a small horizontal mill like an
Atlas, Burke or Benchmaster?

I would like to have a stand with storage for the tooling and
accessories that go with the horizontal mill.

Any ideas as to how you would customize a base for a horizontal mill?

What is the list of accessories that the base would need to store?
Cutters in particular take up alot of space.

I would think that a small shaper, drill press or grinder would also
benefit from a customized base also.

Any suggestions, pictures or ideas?

I've got an Atlas that I put on a toolcart like I did my 4x6 bandsaw.
In both cases, there's a top-sized piece of 3/4" plywood and a chiptray
under the machine. This lets me park the machines out of the way when
they aren't needed and move them into an open area when I use them.
Since the drawers are not always accessible, they are used for machine-
specific tooling and for storage for stuff not needed everyday.

When I get around to reconditioning my Atlas shaper, it may need a fixed
stand. The back-and-forth action of the ram might make a toolcart want
to roll around. I may experiment and see if there's anything easy to do
to lift the cart 1/4" off the floor so it's supported on something solid,
not the casters.

As to accessories, about two (thin) drawers worth: cutters, hole saws,
end-mill holders or collets (plus a drawbar), the arbor and its spacers,
wrenches, the pin wrench for the arbor driver (that round nut with two
pins), T-nuts and associated hdwr, the mill vise, and small stuff.

HSM some years back had some articles by Rudy Kouhoupt about rebuilding
and using an Atlas horiz mill, and one of his suggestions was to make a
workplate with lots of tapped holes and keep it on the mill table, since
one slot for T-nuts isn't all that much. I did that, and my workplate
stays on the table since it gets used a lot more than the vise.

HTH,
Tove

Tove Momerathsson wrote:
When I get around to reconditioning my Atlas shaper, it may need a fixed
stand. The back-and-forth action of the ram might make a toolcart want
to roll around. I may experiment and see if there's anything easy to do
to lift the cart 1/4" off the floor so it's supported on something solid,
not the casters.

Put two 2" square tubing pieces across the width of the base at each
end. Atop those place 2 longitudinal 2x2s. Tie both together with an
over-long bolt and a captive nut inside the tube, welded to the upper
side. Attach casters to the ends of the longitudinal upper bars.
casters should be big enough to keep the crossmembers 1/2" or more off
the floor. Roll machine to position, then unscrew the bolts enough to
drop the machine stand down onto the floor, on the crossmembers. When
you need to move it, just run the screws down to move the weight back to
the casters. Some antiseize on the threads helps, as does a speedhandle
or air wrench. Be sure to use 1/2" or bigger bolts. If the drop height
is more than 1/2", you may have to raise and lower progressively

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Has anyone built a special stand for a small horizontal mill ...

Any suggestions, pictures or ideas?

My suggestion is: instead of thinking stand-with-storage-under think
storage-with-mill-on-top. IOW, find yourself a nice cabinet with the
size of drawers you'll need, etc and reinforce it to hold the mill.

I did that with a McCall's pattern cabinet I found at the curb. I put
angle iron "legs" at/around the corners and an angle iron frame around
the top. A piece of plywood, some bracing. My feeling is that the mill
itself is plenty rigid and only needs something to hold it up - mine
isn't even bolted to the stand.

This approach was important to me as my floor space is very limited.
Combining stand and storage was a big benefit.

The cabinet/stand can be higher than you'd probably think at first. My
cabinet is 38", which puts the arbor around 56". More or less shoulder
level, which means less bending.

HTH,
Bob

Oh ... my mill is an Atlas horizontal - about as small as there is, I think.

Bob, I think you might be on the right track with this approach.

It has always struck me that machine tools and their bases were never
designed for tooling storage in mind. Even small machines like a bench
grinder and its stand normally have no place to store anything. In a
HSM shop where space is at a premium, the extra floor space needed for
a separate storage cabinet is unacceptable if one has many machine
tools.

I think finding the cabinet first that works for the type and quanity
of tooling one has and then insuring that it supports the machine tool
(in your example building an exoskeleton around the cabinet) seems to
be a good approach. Especially in a HSM shop environment where one may
likely place the machine tool on wheels for portability, building a
custom cabinet out of commercially available cabinets seems to be the
route I will take. I have a dislike for open shelves in a cabinet where
chip and dust collect and where they soon become a convenient collector
of wayward items so I expect the cabinets I will build to have drawers
or doors. I also like to reuse whatever is available so to minimize
time spent constructing an item. While in the woodworking world one
would be tempted to build a cabinet from scratch, I think there is
considerable merit in using smaller prefabbed drawers (meant for under
a workbench), cabinets (filing cabinets), small parts cabinets to build
a larger custom cabinet for a machine tool.

Has anyone seen a custom tooling cabinet that works well with a medium
machine tool like a Bridgeport mill? With the mill's popularity and its
standard base, I would think that it would be natural for attaching a
custom tooling cabinet to.

TMT