I Bought a Wells Index 645 Vertical Mill Today 😀
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- Today I bought a Wells Index 645 Vertical Mill from Ray over at Long Machine Tool Co in Ferris, Texas! Today has been a very long but productive day. I brought a mill home today and owe a tremendous thank you to my next door neigher for helping me unload it and heling get it put in the garage. This is a lot of heavy metal to be pushing around going up a slight hill. After lots of effort we finally got it set in the garage! Now I plan on going through it and give it a good cleaning and checking to see if it needs to be rebuilt or used as is. So far everything feels good so I may just use it as is but I do plan on stripping the paint and repainting the entire machine to look new again. In this video I do a walk through of Rays warehouse that is packed full of machines. I have my eye on a few of them 😁
Wow, that turret drill press is cool!
That was the first time I have ever seen one. I would love to see it work sometime.
I had one of those had a brown and Sharpe 9 taper spindle. did lots of good work on that ancient machine
That's a lot of stuff for sale there. I wish i had the room for a mill or lathe. You might be able to retrofit a 220 motor in place of the 3 phase motor. Most of the step pulley mills I've used, were regular 220, and the variable speeds were 3 phase. Like the table size. Pretty compact width wise for garage use. And it's pretty deep. Does the head tilt?
I'm going to leave the 220v motor on it. My gargae only has 110v single phase in it so I'm going to use a VFD to step up from 110v single phase into 220v three phase. The head on this mill moves in and out, tilts left and right and nods forward and backwards
I purchased this same model at auction 30 years ago. Paid $2400. Mine had no DRO, or power feed. I purchased a Servo brand power feed for the long axis from Enco when they were still in business. It goes crazy every so often and feeds too damn fast. I got Align brand ones for the cross and vertical axis. I did make a new shaft for the knee axis so I could mount the feed and keep the hand crank. The spindles bearings needed replacing, initially I pulled them apart and cleaned and greased them, but a few years ago, I found new old stock bearings and put in new ones. Was not too expensive for the high tolerance matched set, of New Departure bearings.
I installed a Mitutoyo DRO, that has worked well, however, the newer import ones that have more features then just absolute and increment buttons would be nice. I have a 12inch rotary table (Vertex, super quality) with a 10inch chuck mounted that lets me do bolt circles and other machining patterns. Also got a Kurt vise, but I think again a Vertex vise would be a good purchase.
As for wear, on the cross axis (Y) the original scrapping pattern is worn off. I assume the original owners machined cast iron and never kept it clean.
Also I did open up the power quill down feed and found dried out old grease, and removed that and relubed with synthetic grease.
I used a home made rotary phase converter on mine when I first got it. I hated the noise, and that I have to start it before I could run the mill. I've replaced that with a VFD. What makes the nice is you can program the VFD to output a max of 120Hz, so I leave my belts at the middle speed setting, and use the VFD to adjust spindle RPM. The nice thing with VFDs you can have it display RPM if you program in the conversion factor of Hz to spindle RPM (the reason I leave the belts at one setting, I also do this with my drill press and lathe).
I was not able to find the manual anywhere on the internet for down load. So I bought copies from Wells-Index directly. The assembly drawings are horrible as they are copies of copies so the line weights are smeared and illegible and they are too small, being copied as size B paper.
You should be having tons of fun by now.
Is the main difference between a mill and a lathe machine the speed of rotation?
With a lathe, the workpiece (the thing your working on) spins and the cutter is basically stationary. It makes round parts. A mill the workpiece is bolted to the table or clamped in a milling vice, and the cutter spins like a drill bit. Most manual mills make square parts. You can make round holes and bore holes and make slots and with the aide of a dro digital read out, you can drill in various patterns.
Basically a lathe spins the work while the tool stays stationary. On a mill the work is stationary while the tool spins.
Geez, how are you going to get it in your garage?
We have already unloaded it and put it in the garage 🙂
@@PaulKepnerProductions Yeah, but how?
@@Imhotep397 we used a 2 ton engine hoist to lift the mill off the trailer and then we rolled it into the garage with lots of effort. The mill weights a little over 2300lbs
They move easy if you get some round bars to roll on. I moved mine with pipes a come along and a tilting trailer!
So now you know when you cant find old cool machines for sale anymore its these guys hoarding them. That 645 is missing some parts