Info Please: Whitney #6 Horizontal

Darren; A few of us have the Nichols mill, its not a bad machine, but you need 3 ph or a converter to run the stock motor. I'm not sure which model you are looking at, but the standard Nichols hand mill weighs 1175lbs, most of which is the 550lb base. see my web site, , for pictures of the disassembled mill. gary

According to :

About 1100 pounds for mine.

Hmm ... "The Whitney" was the predecessor of the Nichols. My Nichols is old enough to still have the "The Whitney" name in the base casting.

Note that mine is the 1100 pound version. I've never seen the

500 pound version.

That makes sense.

No idea about the smaller Whitney -- but I strongly doubt that you could get it upstairs if my larger one is a good example.

The larger Nichols has available a vertical head. I had to adapt my older machine to accept it, but others are more likely to have the adaptor ring already in place.

But -- if you really want to see what they made, download the PDF file of the manual for the machine from my web site:

The file is large -- 33 MB, so you are better off downloading it once, saving it, and sending it to a printer from your computer.

And to see some information about my machine, and what I have done to/with it, back up one level to:

^^^^ Where is "here"? This newsgroup? Currently, or from the Google archives? We've discussed the Nichols mills many times here, as I have taken part in the discussions.

I don't think that you can get it up your stairs. Those things have *heavy* castings -- which makes them *good* machines. And I don't think that I would want to be taking them apart on the ground floor and risking having parts vanish as you are carrying other parts up the stairs. Do you have a secure place where you can take things apart?

Good Luck, DoN.

I sent you a pic of a Whitney, but have yet to ascertain whether your address kosher. If the pic resembles yours, I do have the specs of the machine.

Tom is

Anything like the Nichols was not even a possibility to consider. It's power needs weight and size are definitely too much for me at this time.

Have you finished it?

Darren Harris Staten Island, New York.

I'll see if the seller can send me some pics.

-snip-

I was beginning to think that also. Narrow stairs and turns aren't good. I did however get 1/2 dozen full sized coin-operated arcade video games up the stairs. But the heaviest was only about 300lbs. I did the lifting and someone up top did the guiding.

-snip-

Google newsgroups. I was actually referring to the Whitney Mill, which is what I put in the search field.

Yeah, but the door to the storage room would be too small to fit the machine through. :-)

And renting me one of the four garages underneath me would probably be going too far.

I'm not going to be working with big parts, but I need enough power to work with difficult materials(like stainless steel), and "too big" seems to be a bigger problem than "too expensive"(since I can always save up). A large mill would make getting a lathe out of the question.

Perhaps I should just concentrate on an "intro" multi-purpose machine like this one: (ie:

Unfortunately, it has an MT1 spindle, and the ad and manual don't say how heavy it is.

Darren Harris Staten Island, New York.

That's an old address from a defunct ISP. I'm at: Staten (dot) islander (at) verizon (dot) net

I don't know what the machine looks like, and hope to get picsfrom the seller.

anyone wants the seller info just let me know. He is selling a few machines(Punch presses, surface grinder, Automatic screw machine, milling machines, drill presses, tapper, tool and cutter grinder, ect.). and he is in Rhinebeck.

Darren Harris Staten Isalnd, New York.

According to :

The power needs are not that great. Mine has a 1HP three-phase motor, and a VFD does a nice job of driving it, and offering variable speeds between the belt steps. You will need 240V, which may be available from an outlet for an electric stove, or a clothes dryer (if you have the later in your apartment, instead of a laundry room).

It is even possible to sneak the power from two outlets on two breakers, if you can't get an outlet with 240V in the apartment.

However -- the task of getting one up your narrow stairs would certainly preclude it.

Note that there is one thing which I have not yet seen mentioned concerning using tabletop machines in an apartment. Do you have carpets? If so, you will want to put down something over the carpets to keep the metal chips from getting to the carpets. Those chips (especially the stainless steel ones which you are so eager to produce) will embed themselves in the carpet in such a way that separating them will be a very slow and painful process.

Put a housing of plastic sheet around the machine, and tape the bottom edges down, to keep the chips on the tabletop until you can remove them with a shop vac.

And a nice hardwood floor will also not do well with chips getting underfoot. Probably something cheap, like linoleum, would be the best flooring.

Enjoy, DoN.

Much simpler to make a 240V receptacle if there isn't one that you can borrow now - most apartments that were built as such have individual power meters and a small sub-panel inside the unit with your breakers. It is trivial to install a box at the baseboard directly under the panel and put a 30A or 50A 120/240V 4-wire receptacle there, and if there are no more open spaces in the panel you can swap out two adjacent single breakers for a Quad.

When you move, you pull the breaker you added and place two breaker blanks in the cover holes (or pull the Quad breaker and put back what was there), and you remove the 240V receptacle and blank off the box in the wall. Leave the box, cap off the wires inside the wall and inside the sub-panel with appropriate wire nuts.

You might have to buy some heavy duty SO cord and make a special long extension cord to get from where the panel (and new outlet) is to where the lathe is, but that's much more practical than tearing up someone else's building to get the receptacle in the right room.

Do not try this if your building has Master Metering and the sub-panel is out in the hall - the rental agreement might have a clause about excessive use of power that goes along with the 'flat rate' power charges rolled into the rent. But when power rates went through the roof 20 years ago every building I know of that still had master metering switched over to individual unit meters.

NO! A 240V circuit needs to come from a two-pole breaker with a handle-tie and common trip, so both sides trip off together. When you use the two receptacle circuit hotwire dodge, you create a very hazardous condition when one side trips off - there's still 120V on all the wiring from the other breaker. Someone opens up the lathe to find the problem, and they can get bit from the side that's still hot.

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