As I looked through the pictures, I realized why I had stopped posting as many as I used to. Close-up pictures bring out every flaw and spec of dirt and dust. Things I'd never noticed before leap out from the screen. It makes me want to strip everything down and clean it and rebuild it. I have neither the time nor space to do that. Very dis-heartening.
But that does not keep me from enjoying the tools. I have a short memory..
So here are some pictures of the quill DRO installation. Please disregard the dings and chips and oil and grease and splashes of house paint.
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For the purposes of this post, I'll call the long metal part of the DRO the scale and the bulky black part the reader. The quill stop block is the big metal block with the threaded rod through it.
My first task was to determine the location for the DRO. I wanted to be able to use the stops and the quill lock, so the space directly in front of the quill was the best choice for me. I could have put it between the rapid quill feed handle on the right and the quill lock, but the bracket would have been awkward (many angles) and there were no flat surfaces to mount it.
This is the DRO in place.
This shows that the clearance is not as close as it appears. It also gives a sense of scale. I figured that I needed to get to the stop nuts more than I needed clearance for the fingertips. When down-feeding I'm usually using only fingertips anyway.
The DRO I bought came with a small bracket top and bottom. The bracket shows an interesting manufacturing design. It looks like it is milled from a single direction. The pocket for the DRO scale was milled with a small diameter mill and then a later pass with a band saw took out the corners. This meant that they did not have to change the orientation of the part as it was being milled.
My second task was to figure out the travel of the DRO reader. Would I need to cut away part of the pulley shroud to make room? Would it go down far enough? Which end of the scale did I need to trim off?
I decided that I could mount it in such a way that the top does not go through the shroud and the bottom of the scale does not extend beyond the bottom of the casting (much). The whole length of the scale can be read by the DRO, so I cut off the bottom since that was the part protruding through the bracket when I marked it with the pen.
The brackets are made from 1/8 inch thick aluminum angle. I checked them to ensure that the 90 degree bend was true. The brackets were roughly shaped using a thin-kerf bandsaw for wood and finished by hand.
The reader is bigger than the stop block. In these two pictures you will see that the reader is not centered (vertically) with the stop block. The reader is actually a bit above the stop so that it does not protrude below the casting when it's down all the way.
The second photo shows the bracket screwed to the back of the reader. The holes precisely match the layout of the holes in the reader and were countersunk to minimize clearance problems.
The other end of the bracket is not so pretty. I used what I had on hand to fasten it to the stop block. The through holes for the screws were elongated so I could shift it in or out till the scale was parallel to the travel of the quill.
The bottom bracket was initially a piece of aluminum angle with a 5/8 inch U shaped hole. It went on the threaded rod and a nut held it in place. The U let me move it in and out as needed. Since the scale was held vertically by the bracket on the reader, all I needed to do was to slide the bracket out till it was parallel and tighten the nut. I've since removed the nut and put a screw through the bracket to hold it to the casting, since I was losing 3/8 inch of travel to the extra nut.
And of course the view from below, just to show there is nothing up my sleeve. The slot is in the bottom of the quill stop support rod.
And now the fruits of my labor; 3 and 1/8 inch of travel.
Still to do.... The bottom bracket needs to be flipped over so it is on the bottom of the casting, not the top. The brackets should be painted. The phillips screws should be replaced with socket head cap screws. The sharp edges need to be taken off the OEM bracket. The bottom OEM bracket is crooked. I need to check all the screws to ensure that I did remember to use lock-tite. The very top bracket that I put on the underside of the pulley shroud will go away, as it's not needed. Most of this will never be done since it works properly just the way it is.
And that's all she wrote.
Daniel
