Bridgeport J Head Belt Drive Clones

Hi very new to machining,

But have been watching some YouTubes on milling machines, joined a couple of other forums. Been finding out about edge finders, wigglers, center drills, just general stuff.

I'm interested in making pedal steel guitar and the parts used in making them up.

If one does a Google image search on pedal steel guitar undercarraige, you will see the parts used also have a look at the top of these guitars, the key head and neck would need to be milled.

I was advised to think about getting a knee Bridgeport J Head belt fed milling machine and perhaps a rotary table.Have had a look around on and off Ebay for Bridgeports. As a newbie am reluctant to go the 2nd hand route and end up with a real lemon, that could involve expensive work to sort out.

A new Chester 836 at £6000 is in my price range but reading this forum members views, consensus, seems the 836 is in the lightweight devision.

I've had a look at Warco mills, seem more durable but more expensive.

I was hoping that forum members could direct me to some Bridgeport clones that would be within my price range.

Regards,

Peter

Where I worked we had a Condor bridgeport copy, made in Taiwan,used heavily for a number of years it performed faultlessly, maybe not as nicely finished as a bridgy but did the job exceedingly well. I've also used a KRV bridgeport clone with the variable speed head and that was fine too. Both did pretty much exactly what a Bridgeport would have done. We had Bridgeports in the same shop and I always felt there wasn't much to choose between the clones and the real thing. We did have one Bridgeport with the short 36" table and no power feed that was always my choice for illicit model engineering, the table was so smooth to use and fortunately because of the lack of power feed others didn't seem to use much!

Dave

Project Machinery always seem to have a few Bridgeports and Clones from time to time, No connection other than as a very satisfied customer. Richard who owns the business is knowledgeable and very choosy about the machines he stocks. I've bought both for myself and for work from him with no nasty surprises.

Edited By Dave Wootton on 16/07/2023 13:38:47

I took a look as suggested at the pedal steel guitar undercarriage on Google. I can see nothing here that would need the grunt of a Bridgeport or clone. In fact I would be fairly happy making most of those bits (albeit more slowly) on my tiny Sieg SX1LP.

While a good Bridgeport or clone is (I presume) very nice and very capable if you have the budget and space for one (they weigh upwards of 1 ton and take up a lot of space), I would have thought it was serious overkill for the sort of work you are planning.

In your position and with that sort of budget ( remember you need to spend about as much as the mill costs on tooling etc) I would be thinking hard about a Seig SX3.5 with a DRO.

Your advice is sound. The only caveat pending further information from the OP is the length of the parts and thus the X-travel required.

He talks of the guitar neck in his post and that might need a more creative setup on an X3 than on a turret mill.

Someone was asking similar questions on a US site recently:

https://www.chaski.org/homemachinist/viewtopic.php?t=112738

I have recently sold my Bridgeport 2J belt head milling machine, having owned it for over 10 years. It sold on eBay for £2,300, these machines are now in the region of 40 + years old. Mostly, these machines were used in industry and were 3 phase machines. Mine was a single phase machine, having been converted to single phase as a secondary operation at the end of the production line. As such it was unlikely to have been intensively used and showed little sign of wear. Many second-hand machines are severely worn. I would not purchase a Bridgeport without inspection preferably accompanied by an experienced milling machine user.

Apart from wear, other considerations are the cost of delivery, the space envelope required, and, if not a single phase machine, how to supply 3 phase power.

The first bidder to inspect my machine had received several quotes for moving it 25 miles, the cheapest quote being £500 but found that one of his friends had a 7 1/2 ton lorry with a Hiab, so he could get it moved for the price of diesel plus beer tokens. The winning bidder took 3 hours to move it from my garage and load it onto his 3 1/2 ton trailer with his Kubota digger.

Space required for the machine is quoted in the handbook as 10 ft wide and 7 ft deep, this seem a little excessive, mine was installed across an 8 ft wide garage with just enough room to walk between the controls and a 2ft wide bench against the opposite wall.

Edited punctuation errors

Edited By GordonH on 16/07/2023 16:57:55

Disclaimer :-

I own a Bridgeport but I'm Home Workshop Guy, not Model Engineer Bloke, and pretty much everything I do is in 12 inch to the foot scale AKA full size.

The primary attraction of a Bridgeport in a home shop is that it can handle pretty much anything that can be reasonably lifted onto the table by a solo worker and get a cutter into anything that can be put on 2D drawing comprehensible by an ordinary person. The really tricky stuff being left to the Deckel and Thiel fraternity!

As such a Bridgeport makes an excellent sanity check comparator before finally pulling the purchase trigger on a machine that you think will not only be able to do the jobs you envisage but also have some capability to cope with the unexpected.

The basic question being what can a Bridgeport do that my provisional choice can't.

It's easy to miss things when concentrating on spec sheets with the "can do" vision filter in place. Turning it round to make a "can't do" question relative to a hopefully over capable reference gives a different viewpoint to flush out any errors.

For example:-

"Do I need a 49 inch table when the largest parts I envisage are only 6 inches long?".

Probably not but setting parts up on an angle can seriously burn up table space. That one bit me when I thought a 28" table square column bench mill would do. Hence swopping in a Bridgeport. Of course now I have the bigger machine the work I do has expanded to meet capacity. I'll admit that a 14 ft long job was stretching the envelope a bit and relied heavily on a strategically positioned workshop secondary door!

It's quite likely that a smaller machine may be up to the job.

I was impressed by the metal removal capacity of the square column mill I had which was of very similar size to the aforementioned Sieg 3.5. Its rare that the Bridgeport gets worked harder, blizzards of chips I can live without, but it turned out that too many jobs just wouldn't easily fit.

At least if you do the analysis and find only a Bridgeport will do you will know why.

However you may also be inspired to figure out a different approach which, metaphorically, fits a quart into a pint pot. Normal territory for Model Engineers whose jobs are frequently much larger than industrial practice would put on a machine of the available size.

If you think that may be a possibility just ask here.

Someone will have done similar things with an officially too big part.

Clive

OK thanks for the input people, appreciated.