Bridgeport Quality

I came across a pallet of five burned Excello motors.

Remember motors can be rebuilt. Sometimes the fix or frame is worth the trouble.

The newer wire has better insulation (higher voltage and life) making the total wire smaller - and the whole winding fits in nicely. Only better.

I used to know a motor repair man. He did a large business on custom housings that only came with this machine from the factory.....

I was helping him with the burnout oven design.

Mart> >> I bought my Bridgeport mill new in 1981. Today I just finished power

CNC is little help without a CAD file, which you don't have when making repair parts.

Segway's experimental parts were mostly made manually, cut-to-fit, on a CNC Bridgeport and lathe. I rarely saw them running CNC files, usually an engineer was working from a sketch and inventing the part on the fly.

The files that castings had been made from didn't help without the production machining fixtures to position them. I had to reconstruct their hole patterns relative to locatable reference features, then locate and center-punch new holes with a height gauge and dividers while they weren't stressed by clamping. Thin-walled plastic injection moldings were particularly difficult to clamp securely enough without distorting them.

Expensive CAD seats were in heavy demand. The only one I could borrow was for the powerful but quirky circuit board design program which didn't talk to SolidWorks or the milling machine. It was quicker to just manually mill a one-time part from the drawing while the machine was free than to manually translate and enter the G code.

There was a considerable speed advantage in being able to make non-production stuff in-house rather than cleaning up the drawing enough to send it out.

-jsw

I'm not surprised. I have ran Excello mills and hate them. But I know folks who love them and think they are the best. Eric