Very beautiful old machine. I truly love the sketchwork and the analysis, and the machining technique! I am starting an arbor support for my 1941 Van Norman, and you’ve given me some very good ideas. Thanks!
Thank you! I looked up your Van Norman mill on the Lathes.co.uk archive and notice they are appealing for photos of these machines - only one small machine is currently featured and that doesn't appear to have a way of including arbour support. Interesting!
Absolute great I like your explanations and with the shown metric dimensions it's much better to keep up without all time calculating to real numbers 😂. Just kidding for me it's great anyway.
It looks like you are already planning to do what I was going to suggest, leave the support bar free to slide in the machine, grip the bottom of the arm in the vice, and use the Y feed to slide the bar through the machine to feed past the boring bar? This is a somewhat simpler operation on my mill, as it has a doevetail support bar, and so doesn't need to be prevented from rotating.
You may have anticipated my next move! However, before I can do that I will need to make the cotter and test that the setup doesn't bind. I hope the rotational issue won't be a problem.
After you re trammed it you commented that you measured some out of round due to distortion. Are you sure it wasn't reading the result of tramming and raising the table ?
Good point! If I remember correctly, however, I think I measured before machining at the new setting. The table was raised by a lot more than the out of round. Thanks for your interest.
