Bridgeport project pages updated

You are damn lucky your mill got home OK. Two of your 3 tie-downs relied solely on the position of the knee for tension. Bridgeport knees have been known to work their way downwards while being moved, which apparently didn't happen to you. One good way to go is to screw in a forged eyebolt with 5/8-11 shaft into the tapped hole on top of the ram, then to pass a tiedown through that bolt and crank it down tight, then do fore and aft around the base.

Anyway, you got it home OK. I concur with your forklift method - it's what's called out in the BP manual.

Grant Erw> I've updated two new photo essays regarding my Bridgeport machine at: >

I neglected to mention, the knee was locked. And only 1 of the 3 depended on it. But you raise a valid point.

Next time you move a knee mill, place a block of wood on the base under the knee. Then run the knee down onto the block, then lock the knee. Noticed the boards on the trailer distorting under loading from binders. A couple 4x4s lagged or thru-bolted to the base spreads the load out nicely, and enhances stability.

mj

Hey Grant,

Well, I didn't want to criticize success either, but there were a number of "I wouldn't have done it that ways" apparent. At a minimum, the head should have been inverted to drop the CG, the ram moved back as far as possible, and then the head blocked to the locked lowered knee.

Also, the 5/8-11 eye bolt used was waaaayyyy to long. Proper use of an eye bolt here would be to run it in until the "eye" touches the casting, and cut it off, if necessary, to do so.

Take care.

Brian Laws>You are damn lucky your mill got home OK. Two of your 3 tie-downs relied

I knew about inverting the head, but with forklifts at each end of the trip, the effect on the CG didn't seem to matter.

The problem with lowering the knee is that it lowers the angle of the chains to the trailer. Instead I put the knee higher up, so you get a stiff triangle on each side that supports against side-to-side tipping, which is more of a concern (at least to me) with the base being so much narrower in that direction.

I would have preferred a proper hoisting ring myself, but as it turned out the eye bolt was never used for moving the machine anyway. I only grabbed it off the seller's workbench and stuck it on the ram in case I wanted to lift off the ram separately someday, using my ceiling hooks.

The photos from above give the appearance of the boards bending, but actually it was one of them being previously warped from weathering. If you look from the side you see that they weren't bending much from the load.

I would have bolted right through the floorboards, using some lengths of SuperStrut underneath to spread the load across, if I had known the rental people would have allowed drilling the floorboards, which I didn't. If you mean to bolt the machine on top of 4x4 lumber, then that adds another failure possibility if the wood splits from a bump with all that mass concentrated on the thin bottom edge of the base, so you have a trade off.

Riggers in your area must work differently. I've been a party to a fair amount of equipment moves and when pro riggers were involved they *always* wanted the knees down. Lowers the CG and why put all that tiedown strain on a raised and locked knee?

michael

Hey Richard,

Always exceptions to any rule, eh!?! Very happy all went well for you. Did you get it running yet?

Take care.

Brian. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX >Brian Laws>

Yes, in OP I gave the link to the DC drive conversion to run off single- phase power.