Breaking down a Bridgeport to move-- Weights

This should give you a guide.

The column is the heaviest part, about 750 pounds. But I'd just hire a crane to lower the assembled mill down to the bottom of the stairwell. It isn't that expensive to hire a crane, and it'd be a lot less work.

Gary

Those figures are third-hand and at least a few are overstated by as much as 1.5X. I weighed pieces of my mill when I had it apart for scraping, using a calibrated scale. For example, I found the bare (42 inch) table was 215 lbs, and the bare saddle was 92 lbs.

I was hand-carrying the saddle, like a sack of cement, back and forth between the machine and the scraping bench for weeks, and I don't believe I could have done that with 142 lbs.

Are there any instructions on the web on how to disassemble all these pieces? I'm sure I could figure it out, but it would be nice to have a guide. And to learn from someone else's mistakes!

Thanks!

I took lots of photos but haven't made up description/howto yet:

That would be the way to do it...as long as he has the head room to get a crane boom over the bottom landing of the stairs.

Mike

In many basements, the outside stairwell has a flat bottom, and (more or less) easily removed wooden stairs. When needing to drop something _heavy_ into the basement (up here in NE USA, furnace/boiler is what the builder was probably thinking) you just pull out the wooden stairs and then you can hoist straight down into the stairwell, then roll/drag/skid on into the basement. If you have or rent an A-frame hoist and have adequate surface (or planks) to run on, you can pick up whatever it is and roll it over the stairwell, then lower away.

This was not the case in the basement I got an 8 foot (bed) engine lathe out of, with a rigger's help. That made the job somewhat trickier.