Tramming the Head on the Taig Mill
The cheesy way. Take a piece of 1/4" drill rod and put a slightly round point on it. Bend into a roughly Z shape. Chuck it into a 1/4" collet. Adjust until it will just pick up a thin slip of light paper (cigarette paper) from either end of the mill. Not perfect, but OK for most uses. Also if you use a fly cutter, observe how it cuts. If it cuts the same in either direction, then your alignment is probably OK.
If you want to get really crazy, get a copy of Connelly's Machine Tool Reconditioning. I guarantee you, given the right measurement tools, you could tweak your Taig to an amazing degree of squareness and truth. Not a joke, you could file, scrape, and otherwise tweak it to the limits of the basic design. I've rebuilt a couple of XY stages using some of the procedures from this book. Somewhat tedious, but they still work for systems with unhardened sliding surfaces. All depends how close is close for you.
Other hints: Lock any unused axis, I've had the Z-axis drift down on me once in along session.
Accessories for the Taig Mill
One problem? that the mill has is that very few standard accessories will fit a 1/4" t-slot. I find making things fun, so to me this is just a challenge. Items that you can find, but are expensive, are studs. These run over a buck a whack! Other things like spherical washers are also ungodly expensive. The photo shows my collection of homemade studs, t-nuts and miscellaneous 1/4-20 cap screws. The little brass pieces are homemade spherical washers, made with form tools on the Taig lathe. Also shown are some strap clamps and some other little goodies to go with them. I've also made up some small machinist jacks (not shown yet).
The form tools are REAL fast, you have to feed them like crazy to prevent chattering. I basically set up the stop for the desired depth and crank the handwheel like a maniac, bouncing it back a bit from the stop. Leaves a very nice finish, I was surprised. I think 1/4" wide is close to the maximum for a form tool used on brass in the Taig. The rear tool post works well with form tools.
Cutting off with the rear tool post is a breeze, I ordered the cutoff tool! It's even better.
Spherical washers are washers with bearing surfaces that are not flat. If you cut them in half and traced the shape that the bisected part, you would see that the shape is part of a circle. There is a male part and a female part. They are used as spacers when your clamping uneven parts. the two halves slide against each other so that the clamping surface and the nut don't have to be parallel.
You don't have to be as fancy as this, Nick Carter mentioned that "for studs I just whacked up a length of 1/4-20 threaded rod into convenient lengths. For the pressures that you clamp small stuff with, hardware grade fasteners seem adequate. For t-nuts I bought a length of 1/2"x1/4" CRS, whacked it up into 3/4" lengths and tapped 1/4"-20."
I've some of those tapped 10-32. I use hardware store nuts, a good grade though... One advantage of making your own studs instead of using allthread is that if you have one very short end as shown, you can't screw it into the table and possibly damage it. Most of the stuff is made from shop scraps or CRS which is cheap, none of the projects took over a day's worth of time.
For example, the washers took about the following time:
- Grind form tools, 15 minutes using ball as a gage
- Set up lathe with 2 tools, drill and stops set, 10 minutes
- Each part, 30 seconds or so...
- Deburring, etc. 30 seconds or so...
The studs are almost as fast, maybe a 2-3 of minutes each. Hardware store studs in 1/4-20 are over a buck a piece!
