Some days ago during a nocturnal prowl through the expanse of eBay I had stumbled across a beautifully rigid universal milling machine. Coincidentally the machine was sold by a dealer only 25 minutes away from home… This is how the story of our UW1 started.
After short negotiations the deal was sealed and a few days later Fabian picked up the machine.
Our newest addition to the shop will help a lot for our current project where we want to equip our CNC router with ball-bearing spindles.
[toc]Technical details
Figure: Korradi UW2
The machine is comparable with Deckel FP2 and similar kind but has a much lower price tag (at least for used machines). Besides her 48 years the machine still has its original paint, shows absolutely no run-out error (0,002mm checked in the taper) and all mechanical functions theme to work properly.
Advantages UW1:
- Automatic feed on all axis
- Small foot-print for the output it provides
- SK40 tool holding. Widely available and thus inexpensive
Preparation
Well, the machine also has a little downside. The last 120mm of negative Z travel pushes the Z spindle below the machine frame. Thus we need either to drill a hole in the floor (ew!) or weld together a frame.
We have decided to weld a frame from 60x42x6mm U profiles and a bit of other metal scraps. This way we can use the pallet lifting cart to maneuver the machine in the already too small shop.
Transport
Again a big thank you to our Friends Martin and Tom who have helped us transporting the machine.
Compared to the lathe the UW1 (approximately 1.000 Kg) was a lightweight. This time the height of the machine caused the problem. It barely fit inside the truck – even after the spindle was titled away.
The future
In general the machine is in really good shape. The following points are rather improvements than repairs:
- Attach bellows to the Z axis to avoid chips getting trapped inside the linear guide way. Maybe parts for the Deckel FP2 will fit…
- Equipping the machine with a DRO and glass scales on all axis. Maybe we will go for a magnetic scale system to save some money.
- Buy a crank for the quill to use the machine for boring
- Building a chip and cooling liquid pan from stainless steel
- Add two e-stop switched to the machine
And last but not least (some of you may have waited for this already…) at some point we may add some CNC intelligence to the machine. This will in particular be interesting as we want to conserve full manual functionality (e.g. auto feeds). Good example projects can be found online where other hobby-engineers have retrofit similar machines already. Stay tuned.
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