what to do with a free scrap dumpster find ?

      hear are some pictures of the Rulon film and what the ways looked like under that film. i wish everything was lined with Rulon. but the scratches in the Rulon looked about the same as the scratches on the bottom of the table. it was so bad not one little bit of the scraping survived on the mating surfaces of the table bottom. the box ways had some wear but it was what you would expect on a machine close to 50 years old.

i have yet to even find Rulon film as thick as what this stuff is? it's probably around 30 Mil thick and everything i seen was only 10 Mil thick or in sheet form and the price of sheet stock will make your head spin once you see the price.

The ways look great. Is there any way that the machine could work without the Rulon as a conventional iron-on-iron slideway?

it does have an oiler and lines but the mating surface is the rough part. the Rulon did a great job at protecting that side but caught and held the grit and destroyed the under side of the table which is not shown. the Rulon had a long oil groove along the center so you would probably have to machine some into the cast iron so the oil can flow?

the original drive for the upper table was set up for a rack so once you take .03 out of the system the gear might bind on the rack?

i was talking to the son of the owner who bought this thing almost 50 years ago and he told me they lost control taking it off the truck when they delivered it and i know it got dropped when they moved it a few years ago to make room for the new 5 axis machines. which i thought it had fallen more than once since i found pins busted in the head bearing assembly that looked like they were broke for a long time

so one hand wheel is busted up pretty bad and the rack was boggered up pretty good on one end. i think the shaft for the handwheel might have been bent to but that's just a hunch.

those ways on top of the saddle are the best looking just because they had Rulon covering them. i wish it was on all surfaces but i still don't know how hard it would be to move since a metal on metal guide is not that efficient . maybe in 1950 it was state of the art but not so much these days

i think the best solution would be to just forget about scraped ways altogether and just mount so linear ways and ball screws. first off you would create better mechanical efficiency and reduce the need for larger motors to overcome the added friction and you would have a proven system that can handle the high cycling of a cnc machine. so in this case the long and cross travels get new linear ways the head assembly will stay the same and only use the bigger motor there where needed to deal with weight and less efficient linear guides. plain bearings have some advantages because of the amount of surface area in contact. i will add a ball screws on all three.

so as of now that's the plan good thing this thing was free

Most probably would have done the same, mostly coz i have plenty of rails and screws collecting dust.

honestly you have the framework mapped out and lots of the work is done already and have about 1500lbs of quality cast iron to build on. i took this machine with the idea of making it into something useful to me.

i did toss the table up on the mill and checked the outer edge where things were not as bad and i did spend a lot of time stoning the table bottom and ran a indicator down about 2 foot of the table and it was flat. so i have a method to check my flatness as i go so that's a plus.

with a machine with a small foot print i have enough equipment to do things accurate at least. all the modifications are from the box ways up so the table and saddle i can work with on the manual mill