Hercus milling machine.

 I have been considering buying a mill and lathe for several years now, but didn't want anything too large as my garage has height limitations (a Bridgeport wouldn't fit) and I really didn't need anything quite that big in a mill. The lathe will be another story when I get one, I'll buy the biggest single phase machine I can.
 But I digress. I didn't want to buy one of the cheap little Chinese pedestal mills as the tubular upright is too flimsy for serious milling and having a machine that's just a vertical mill has it's limitations also.
 The larger Chinese/ Taiwanese mills, with their dovetail columns, are better machines, but still limiting and quite expensive for what they are.
 I didn't know Hercus made a small mill till I saw one on Ebay and decided to buy it. It was missing a couple of parts for horizontal milling ( the arbor and end support), but it was otherwise complete, if very ugly in it's fine paintbrush and leftover fence paint job:

So I went up to Sydney, picked it up and brought it home:

 I was promised the mill had "always been lubed with oil, never grease". As with everything people say about used equipment, I did not believe it, and I was proven right. By the looks of the machine, the guy had never used it, it was packed full of dried, gummy grease and the fact the spindle pulley wouldn't rotate on the spindle shaft, plus the bearing noise on the spindle, meant a full tear down. If he had tried to use it, he probably would've seized the thing.
 I found every oiling orifice, port and bearing chock full of very old, very dried grease and the spindle pulley was very tight on the spindle, fortunately it turned out, due to the grease acting as an adhesive, rather than it being seized on the shaft. The grease proved extremely troublesome to remove, I have an ultrasonic cleaner big enough to fit all the rotating parts in to and it has the added feature of being able to heat the cleaning fluid up. I used  a caustic degreaser at 70c for two hours and it still took a lot of scraping to get all the grease out, then a soaking in petrol to get the last of it!
 Tearing it down due to this stickiness proved time consuming, a fair bit of heat to the spindle pulley let the grease soften a bit and allowed the shaft to be driven out. Another reason I wanted the spindle out was to replace the drive belt, which had  a nasty bit of wear in one area, obviously run with the pulley tension off, who knows why:

Anyway, I didn't get many photos of disassembly as it is quite straightforward and diagrams are around on the internet. But here are a few I took as I disassembled to ensure correct reassembly:

 Here is the mill being stripped of paint:

 I stripped the paint with chemical stripper and then switched to coarse sandpaper on a sander, using a knotted wire wheel in tighter areas. Then it was primed with 2k epoxy primer, which I had left over from a car paint job:

 Then onto topcoat. I mixed up some classic cream with some matt black enamel to come up with a light grey. I was trying for more of a dirty beige, but it ended up mostly grey. If you look at it in the sun, there is a very slight beige to it, but I like the colour well enough. It's better than bottle green anyway!
Then it was on to reassembly:

  The mill is simple enough to put together and the spindle bearings are standard, off the shelf sizes, both cup and races. As is the drive belt, a standard A size belt in A32 size, which is 13mm wide by 813mm long. The mill has a huge range of adjustment for the belt tension, any belt within 15mm either way on length would work on this mill.
The bull gear is tricky to get onto the spindle shaft as you need to heat it, feed it on whilst following it with the spindle pulley and then feeding the whole lot into the rear bearing  bore. It takes four hands and thick leather gloves to handle the hot bull gear.
 Don't be like me and put the bull gear on backwards, then realise it and madly scramble around tapping the shaft back out before the bull gear cools and grabs the spindle!:

I also wanted to convert the mill over to 240v operation. I saw all the half correct information online and decided that a phase converter wasn't worth the hassle, expense and loss of power this already small (0.37Kw) motor had. That took me into the wonderful world of electric motors.
 I learned a fair bit, which I will share here. Electric motors, having been around forever, are one of the few components that I've come across that are actually standardized, and standardized very well.
There are several motor "frame" sizes and those sizes also guarantee a few specifics about the motor, such as shaft height from mounting feet and shaft size.
 Knowing this, and that the original motor was a "71" frame motor, I confidently ordered a 240v replacement of the same power rating. I considered going to a larger motor (which I could've in the 71 frame), but I am not sure how stout the mill internals are, I'd rather stall the motor than strip teeth off a gear!
 I also discovered that electric motors (and I suspect they also share this with hydraulic motors) have a series of standardized mounting flanges. To save anyone hassle if hey buy this mill, the early Hercus mills use a "B5" mounting flange:

 So, to make things ridiculously simple, you order a B5 flange to suit the 71 series motor you just bought. As a 71 series motor has a specific front face to it as part of it being a 71 motor, the flange just bolts right up between motor and flange. Total cost for flange and motor was $145 delivered. The motor I bought is made for cement mixers- continuous full load at rated output. Very similar to what a mill does.
 Here's the motor fitted. Because the original ASEA motor was 3 phase and had a massive phase controller/ transformer/ancient switch gear on the front panel, it did not need the external box that's on the single phase motor, which consists of a start and run capacitor, as it only runs on a single phase and needs the capacitor to get the windings initially out of time compared to the rotor to initiate rotation, then switches to another capacitor to maintain rotation at desired rpm. A 3 phase motor uses the three phases to achieve rotation. Anyway, the external box doesn't get in the way and as a bonus of using the mixer motor, it comes with a built in circuit breaker:

 And here's the very simplified wiring of the new control panel. I will add a switch for a light later on and blank the retaining hole. I went with heavy duty switch gear and used some nice 1.5mm sq, rubber coated cable for the hook up and power lead, I also made sure to have plenty of lead (7m long).

And to prove it all wasn't a fluke:

More to come. I will disassemble the vertical head and clean what I am sure will be grease out of it, plus tidy up the vise. I'm also considering making the old access hole below the switch panel into some sort of storage, but not sure how to go about that at the moment.
 I will also make an arbor for the horizontal mill and also mill up an end support once the mill is fully operational, I think a good solid chunk of aluminium will be plenty stout enough for an end support on such a small machine, and will be pretty easy to mill out.