Power feed for a mill.

Due to a medical problem, I am finding it increasingly painful to operate the feed screws on my vertical mill. What I need is power feed. The hand wheels are held on with nuts, 5/8” across the flats.

Grumble about the pain; think; flind a suitable socket, make an adaptor and fit ithe socket to my variable speed power drill. I now have power feed! It ain’t pretty, but solves my problem.

Maurice

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That's what really matters.

MichaelG.

And a safety feature in one direction! The nut will undo and prevent any further movement!

More seriously, if it works, why not? It will give you time to make more permanent drives, simply operated by the flick of a switch, or two. Better feed rate control still, although a drill can be more constant than manual operation

I’m luckier than you, but raising and lowering the table on the mill (for multiple tool changes when drilling and threading several holes in succession) is a pain - well not a pain, but tiresome - as I can’t justify getting sets of tooling of all the same length, and choose not to use a grossly over-sized chuck (which might help).

Hi Guys,

I made a mill table drive using a salvaged car window wiper motor. It can easily be powered from an old computer PSU. Using the gearing that I used, at 7 to 8 volts it takes about 2 amps.

The white knob pulls back to allow direction changes with a neutral position in the middle. It is a simple dog in a slot mechanism. The wiper motor is dual speed, not that its needed since I actually use a variable voltage PSU and can crank up the voltage to 30 for fast traverse if I need to.