And then. Wednesday. Mrs Foo went off on a 2 day hiking trip with some of our friends, leaving me to look after the house, go to work, and all that jazz. Bloody marvellous. Bunch of bastards. Wednesday midday, on the local small ads site, "small milling machines". I look. 2 small milling machines, like it says on the label. Grotty photos. Look really scruffy and missing a lot of parts. Phone anyway. "Yes, they are pretty scruffy. Yes, missing parts, but I might be able to source some of the missing bits for you". "What are you wanting to get for them?" "Make me an offer" "Hrm. Twice the scrap rate, absolute maximum" "Fine, I'll deliver on Friday. One, or both?" "Only the one".
And so, yesterday, I became the owner of 2/3 of a Crouzet FC100. A bit rusty, a bit grotty, but the slideways are all complete and have their scraping marks visible under the layer of light corrosion, motor works, mechanical variator appears to work, the horizontal spindle turns freely and without play. Missing in action : vertical head (but the guy might have found one for me, we'll find out on Monday maybe), all handwheels, leadscrews, nuts and accompanying hardware.
Mrs Foo is not impressed, despite the fact that on Thursday I sold an Amiga 1200 I pulled from the tip, for twice what I just paid for scrap iron.
The other machine was a Wirth and Gruffat, a bit smaller, but missing a lot more. Not worth the hassle of parting it out, to be honest.
X travel stock is 220mm, but that can be upped to 300mm by extending the leadscrew or sacrificing the rapids. I don't have rapids, but I do have a plan. Y travel 100mm. Z travel 330mm. Horizontal spindle bore Morse 4 with adaptors for morse 3, morse 2, and W20 (I believe the current one is W20, I hope so as I have a lot of W20 tooling for the lathe). Vertical head if I can find one is W20. Continuously variable speed (missing the rev counter, bah) and a 1.5hp 3 phase motor (220/380).
This is how it should look (mentally delete the horrible jade green Hammerite finish) :
Photo courtesy of https://www.lathes.co.uk, but they seem to block embedding
This is how it actually looks :
Yes, I can haz miling machien.
