It Moves

I got the VFD hooked up to the mill. I have no idea where to put it. I may just screw it to the wall. It’s going to be a phase converter most of the time, so it’s basically an on/off switch. I don’t need it to be terribly handy.

The manual for TECO VFDs is horrendous. I’m sure the Chinese part is written much better. The English part is hopeless, even for a guy who already programmed another VFD. Luckily, I found out how to make it generate 60 Hz, and that’s all I need.

I don’t understand why the mill takes up so little room. Well, yes I do. The guy who made the pretty Bridgeport floor space diagram I relied on must have been crazy. He claimed a 42″ BP takes up so much room, you need 74″ of wall on either side of the corner in which the mill sits. I don’t know how he got that idea. My mill is wider and appears to need less room than that.

I haven’t machined anything, obviously. But the mill is probably trammed, the vise is probably aligned correctly, the oil thing is full of Vactra, and the VFD works.

Maybe I could check the tramming by facing something, turning it over, and facing it again. Mike–you have to love this guy–saw a piece of scrap steel on the side of the road while he was driving down from DC, and he stopped, backed up 85 feet, and put it in his car. I could put it on parallels, face one side, put that side down, face the other side, turn it around, start facing it, and see if the cuts look funny. I would think a head that was out of tram would cause a face cutter to hit the work crookedly, and that you would see it as the work moved under the spindle.

I guess there’s a clever way you’re supposed to check the tramming. Things like that have a way of appearing in my comments. Or maybe the tramming itself, being a measuring process, is, itself, supposed to be the check. Generally, though, machinists have ways of double-checking themselves.

The vise is super-duper aligned, I think. I used a metric Tesa TI, and it doesn’t move when you take the vise across the spindle. I thought that was cool. Tramming was no fun at all. The machinist’s square made it a lot easier, because when I got way off, the square brought me back to a reasonable starting point.

I have to figure out what kind of oil to put in the cups on the head. I have air tool oil and spindle oil. I have two weird Mobil oils. DTE 24 and DTE 26, I think. The head runs at up to 5000 RPM, so I don’t want to put the wrong thing in there. It might actually be in the manual!

I’m wiped out. Tomorrow, I machine.