New Mill Upgrade Delivery

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I lucked into picking up an extended table for my milling machine.  Sieg made a large table version of the SX3 mill but only sold it outside of the USA.   Little Machine Shop happened into getting just five of the tables as “replacement parts,” which turned out to be the last five they will ever get since Sieg has discontinued them.

The table is going to be a nice upgrade for some of the machining I want to do, since my current table does not have enough X travel to fully machine (never mind profile) a 19″ wide rack mount faceplate.  The old table was around 22″ long with around 15-16″ of travel.  The new table is around 27″ long and should have at least 20″ of travel.

It won’t be a trivial upgrade process, since I need to turn down a new, longer, ball screw for the X axis.  This means some time on a lathe, which at the moment I do not own (but that’s about to change – more on that soon!).  Also, it seems the sides of the table do not have the holes drilled that hold the side plates on, so I’ll have to do that myself as well.

It’s still covered all over in the sticky red Cosmoline protectant they put on it when it leaves the factory in China, and I think I’ll leave it there until I have all of the other prerequisites met so the project can move forward later this summer.

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