Next! Childs & Co Milling Machine

Long before I had a garage I started buying back the items I had to sell when I sold my house north of Seattle. As many here know... I had a minor problem getting that garage built... and so one of the things I found at an estate sale just about a mile from here sat in the back on my pickup under a tarp for over a year.

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It's a Childs & Co 0000 Vertical Milling Machine. It's a baby milling machine. But not so small I can't do some things with it. And better than not having one. Here it is mounted up on a stand at the end of my lathe... which is going to get some work soon as well. The lathe is functional, so it's not coming apart until I get these other things built/repaired/restored. The main issue with the milling machine was the motor being lock-solid frozen-up. Unfortunately, I think that may have happened while it sat so long in the back of my truck.

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So, though repairing the mill wasn't really on the agenda right now, on the floor in front of the lathe sat a small table saw I got, for free, (begged to take it, in fact) because the owner didn't want it to go to the dump. The saw is somewhat worthless (maybe) and I agree because I thought the motor on it appeared to be similar, if not the same, as the one on the milling machine. I was getting tired of kicking that saw around so today I decided to see if the motor was something the milling machine could use. Well, one thing led to another and now I'm committed. And, fortunately for me, the motor was the correct motor, and it even works! Yay. Free is sometimes good.

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There's not a lot of pictures of these out there on the ol' Interwebs, but here's a similar model and what it'll look similar to very soon. Enjoy the process.

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I can tell the excitement level is high on this build, so here's the next installment.

It didn't take long to take it all apart and get cleaning on it.

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One of the things I had to address is the end of the motor being just a bit bigger than the old one. So I had to set it up on the drill press and find center and set up a means to hog out some of the motor plate. And make it more round instead of what you see. My fly cutter didn't like this and the other one I know I have is hiding, so I ended up just using a hole saw. It went fine and you'll see that in the painted picture.

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After degreasing all the parts I spent a day using a host of flap and Scotch discs, along with my blast cabinet, to start cleaning the "heavy parts".

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Then they were masked and sprayed. Tomorrow I'll unmask them all and work on the smaller parts needing to be cleaned up.

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Got new bearing today for it, so it should start going together in a couple days.

​This is looking really good. Keep the pictures coming. I want to see the final build. Larry

Making pretty good progress. I discovered a change was made by a previous owner, which was obvious when I bought it, but when they made the change they (for some unknown reason) eliminated one of the fore/aft thrust bearing for the table. So, after staring at it a while I decided I need to make it right. I found an ebay seller offering 4 of these bearings for $12, which considering Grainger wanted $30 for 1 of them, I figured 3 spares would go in a drawer. What I have to do is machine a recess in the knob for one of these so the knob can go flush. This meant I could to continue assembly. I assembled it as though the correction is done (had to adjust inner thrust bearing and stop) and just put a shim washer in there for now to keep the knob from using the paint as a wear surface, for now.

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The rest is just going together smooth as butter. All the small parts cleaned up nice. Tomorrow the rest of the "detail painting" can be done on the "black spots" (the background for the white lettering) and then the motor goes on. I'm thinking I'm done by Thursday with this until I get those bearings. I can use it as is, as the previous owner did, but these thrust bearing make moving the table fore and aft and left and right - under the force of moving an end mill through a piece of metal - so much easier.

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Almost had it running before getting called in for dinner, but it's all together now. Spent the morning meticulously doing the lettering... and man they wanted you to know what this thing was.


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Then worked on getting the motor reworked (from the saw I got for free) and mounted. Not sure how they did it originally, but I ended up getting 8-32 threaded rod and making 7 1/4" studs to screw into the mount plate and adding a couple nuts and a washer to create a space for the motor to breathe. Then I pulled all 4 screws holding it together and held it together as I lowered it over the studs and into the pully. Then nuts up top to put the motor back together. But at that point, that was it. Power cord and hook up the switch and decide what to use for a vise (may get another one).

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I put a vise from a full size milling machine (I got it for free from the guy I bought my lathe from) on this just to prove to me how much smaller this thing is than I'm used to. I used to have access to all this sort of thing... but in a much larger scale. I used the lather more than a mill, so I think I'll manage.

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