Rodney Restoration : The Great Myford Milling Attachment

if only my lathe was a

milling

machine

rodney

in a world of

myford

accessories there is one that rises above

rodney

i guess it was invented by a guy named rodney this is very exciting i have never made a rodney before let's start with this gear thing this doesn't live here this is just stuck on the shaft for the sake of shipping this is what sticks out of the lathe and on the back of Rodney. I don't have a service manual or any other information on how these come apart, so let's start picking things apart and hopefully figure it out.

I assume, based on this gasket, that we are dealing with a gearbox full of oil. I removed the obvious set screws and nothing seems to move. Oh, this is a little complicated, so it was a little difficult to get the gear out. A serrated set screw isn't the best now that I have movement, but it doesn't seem to help. I expected the shaft to come out through the gear. at this point and then I noticed this little insect, a sneaky conical pin. I'm guessing it's a tapered pin anyway, I can't tell which end is small and it doesn't want to move easily, it looks a little beat up.

So I wiped what I think is the small end down and that's when I noticed something interesting. I even filed down. I can see the pin is stuck in the gear. I think someone has intentionally hit both ends of the pin so it never does. come out so my plan is to drill out the top of the pin and a little bit of the gear don't do this to anyone okay now the shaft is moving but I don't want to push this mess through the bearing so that's it needs to be fixed and now finally it was hours of real time this shaft comes out now you can see the other bevel gear I unscrewed the little screw I hope you know but the gear didn't fall out so I guess the shaft has to come out first , so let's do it by removing this pulley first, now the bolts connecting the castings are exposed and if you follow along at home, it would be a little less cumbersome to separate the castings first and then drive the vertical shaft. but it only took a few light taps with the tool to remove the leather shaft, so it's no big deal in my case and you can now see the set screw that secures the second bevel gear.

There is no way to access this now that it is on the business end of the machine. As much fun as it is to play with the parts on Rodney's floppy disk, I'm going to ignore them for now and deal with the important part: the pen. The pen handle has a small set screw to keep the lever in the middle position, which is unnecessary in this case, because the lever is rusted into place, this elegant brass gear is held in place with a pin that didn't hold up too much and of course the gear didn't slip and now I have access to remove this strange looking lever system.

I think it's a pretty simple mechanism but I'll probably have to play with it a bit to figure out exactly how it all works together and this knotted mold hanging in the middle is the most unusual part because it's kind of floating and makes accessing making the nut for vertical sliding a real pain. We're not done with the dismantling yet, but removing this sprocket gives access to another bearing. This bearing is super tight both around the aluminum boss and inside the pulley I have. I have no idea why the last piece of the puzzle to separate is the axle and as you can see the bearings are completely broken.

The only forum post I could find online about dismantling a Rodney was from a guy asking for help because he couldn't get it. the shaft separated so I expect a fight ok so there is the inside of the shaft. Someone replaced all the other easy access bearings in the past, but I suspect the shaft bearings are original, the shaft came out of the boom with no problems and Likewise, the bottom bearing came off the shaft with just a few light taps, As you can see the second bearing came out even easier, well most of it and now I have a problem: the outer race is stuck inside the quilt and sits in a gap that leaves nothing to press against if I can't get it out. the bearing race.

This machine is effectively scrapped. It took me a while. I tried a few different small things, but finally found that this screwdriver was just the right shape to catch the edge of the bearing race. and it came out pretty easily once I was able to give it a swipe, Rodney, now it's time to paint starting with each primer. Now the plastic cap must be treated differently. First of all, I didn't use paint stripper in case it melted the plastic. I'll sand the paint instead and secondly, I noticed this repair above, it feels pretty good, but I'm going to add epoxy on both sides anyway.

I'd rather be sure it's strong enough that it won't crack after painting. Done, I'm gouging about a quarter of the depth of each side and filling it with epoxy and the bare plastic part is coated with a bit of plastic primer bringing it up to the same point as everything else. Now it's time for the primer. I was going to cover everything with a couple of coats of this epoxy primer, I sprayed the parts outside, there were people around so I didn't feel like setting up a camera, but here's the final result, you can see I'm sanding through one coat guide and Fill any small imperfections with 3m putty and that is the last step before final painting.

Now these Rodneys were originally painted a silver color. I say ish because it was silver with a hint of cow. I'm going to be using a different color called

myford

so join me in the paint booth and get ready for some unnecessarily epic painting okay look I have excuses I have a machine gun but it's been driving me crazy with an air seal with leaks, so I used a full size spray gun for this, which is like watering. letters with a fire hose, I'm shooting half a trigger at most, except it clearly doesn't matter, maybe I can fix it with primer, well, it could use another coat.

Okay, time to machine it, this is part of the lever assembly. Look at it, this threaded part was obviously made by some guy and there's no way it could have worn down to that extent. I have to assume it was machined like this by a carpenter. You know the guys who cut down trees anyway. How or why? not important for the lathe now it was 16 threads per inch the small end is 18 which means suffering through changing a bunch of gears if only you had a quick change gearbox and here we are the final assembly, rodney, sorry, rodney, what a rodney, okay, the sticker, yeah.

Rodney's sticker looks stupid, I wasn't going to bother, okay, calm down, this is the old sticker, as you can see, Rodney didn't put much effort into the logo design and it's crooked, but look at this picture from the internet, these Rodney were expensive. but the guy who cut the sticker sure didn't care anyway i have a plan, i paid a guy to print me a waterslide decal instead of black stripes, i chose white stripes and light spaces, now the printing It's not spectacular. well, pretty good, if you were using a dosh dot matrix printer from 1995, there are a couple of flaws too, but let's stick one in and see how it turns out.

I have two copies, so I can afford to ruin one now. I'm no decal expert, but I'm starting to suspect something is wrong here. The background is white. The type is printed on white decal paper instead of clear. How do you screw this up when printing decals? Ah well, you can't trust those random guys. I found it on the internet now, this wasn't the first method I tried for the logo, it's been a long saga, at this point I'm over it. There is no logo, it looks fine without one. Rodney Rodney Rodney Rodney, so I've been thinking.

I've been thinking about how many of you are going to comment unbearably that there won't be a Rodney logo if I don't make a Rodney logo. I guess we'll try again. I really hope the masking tape comes off cleanly. Don't panic. looks good from a distance i'm kidding this isn't unexpected i'll tidy up some with a brush and a razor blade not bad now for rodney i'm using a rodney decal that i printed myself why not? Don't you do that in the first place? I heard you ask. Well, I needed white on clear and my printer doesn't print white.

Now a decal isn't going to last five minutes in a shop so I buried the whole thing under four coats of clear and I think it looks pretty good, maybe a little handmade on the edges but overall I think it's pretty good , okay, time to put Rodney back together starting with the spindle. This is a basic spindle with two bearings separated by the boom, in this case. They're angular contact bearings, nothing fancy, but good old Rodney decided to use imperial size bearings on the shaft, so they were about $160 each. The shaft was designed so that oil could drip through a hole in the top cover to lubricate the bearings.

I will not do it. I'm going to use grease. This grease is a little fancy but I want it to last a long time. I am using this steel bar as a hot plate to heat the bearings. and of course, only half of it worked in the chaos. I didn't press record, but this is how I tapped the bearing the rest of the way home using the flat side of the yankee and now the quill goes on the quill, it's pretty easy. It fits and the second bearing is not going to slide because of course it has to go into the boom and onto the shaft at the same time and I'm going to plug this little oil hole, I think the garbage gets through that hole.

It's probably what destroyed the old bearings, so the little collar squeezes the pair of bearings and pushes the inner races closer together while the pen keeps the outer races at a certain distance at the time you can see there is a lot play in the bearings. So I tightened the collar until I couldn't feel any end floating and now checking with the gauge you can see there is still a couple thousand inches of end float so at this point a couple more taps to get rid of it of that last little bit. and making sure the shaft still spins freely, I'm a long way from knowing if I bought a piece of junk or not, but let's see, oh, three powers quite a bit, even at the end of a test bar, I was able to give the bar a whirl test to make sure it's seated correctly, but if there's a burr or chip or whatever is causing this to run out, I don't want to transfer that damage to my test bar, so let's first take a direct reading of the shaft and see if the shaft itself is working properly, well that's surprisingly good, I know I could be using a test gauge with finer resolution but still the needle barely moves, let's recheck the taper with excellent dead center , apart from a couple of rough patches. the center of that spire still looks pretty impressive.

I need to replace this fucked up pin. I don't know what size this pin is, but I'm going with a number zero which is a little larger, which leaves me room to close the hole now that they are imperial. oversized pins, I don't know why but they are still the most common pins here, this damn hole took me quite a while because there were errors in ordering the correct reamer, you don't just order a number zero reamer to go with a number zero reamer. pin oh no, there is a nominal fractional size that also goes with the pin, which obviously you have to cross reference on a chart in the machinery manual and now you know how many fractions of an inch the small end of a zero pin is, luckily Reamers are measured in a fraction of an inch on the large end, but hey, it's only a 1 in 48 taper, so cross reference that on page 77,000 of the machinery and pen manual I ordered the reamer of the wrong size.

The large end still needs to be cut off. down a bit, but I like to leave my tapered pins sticking out on both sides. This is the vertical shaft that holds the other bevel gear, as you can see it is just held on by the set screw. I think the other type of pin was a user. modification and I'm going to do the same thing here, okay, I think that's the last fix we need to do, so let's put this back together and see how it works. It basically puts itself back together the way it fell apart.

It's not complicated, but just in case. You're the only other guy in the world putting a rodney back together. I made things harder than necessary. Here, for example, it didn't really make sense to push the shaft in before installing the bearing retainer plate. The seat bolt doesn't do anything now. You don't need to point this out, but I figure I might as well live here instead of the bottomless jar of screws I'll never use again, but for some reason I'm not going to fill this thing with oil which just sounds like a complicated nightmare. I'm going to try this fancy grease on the gears and see how it lasts.

The alternative would be to bury the gears in a large amount of normal grease which would also work fine,so a tip for that other reassembler Rodney. There was really no need to put the big pieces together before the end. I thought this would look better in the video, but it just made things more cumbersome, so that's the spindle and quill part of the machine assembled and it seems to work as it should, but this lever mechanism feels really awkward like was tied and I noticed that this main locking nut is not flat, which probably means that the bolt, which is also the shaft for the fine adjustment mechanism, is not straight. for some reason and I think we can do better so I suspect this board is the culprit, it's probably bent from over tightening, how does this work?

The two levers are unrelated, this one locks the boom like a drill, this lever locks the fine adjustment mechanism on or off and looking at the front of that plate made all the difference. Now it's nice and soft. I didn't really like the way this pulley was going, so I pushed it all the way. I remember when I took this out, it was a nice slide. It fit, oh and I forgot the spacer so it came off and after a bit of playing around I managed to get it back in nicely. The bearing inside this other pulley is very tight and is even tighter as it passes over the aluminum boss on the cast head.

I forgot it. I had to use heat to get it out. I have a block under here to hold the head and I'm being very gentle with the hammer, but this would have been 10 times easier and faster if I took the head off and put it on. It went flat on the bench, like I said I forgot how tight the bearing was coming loose so I kept waiting for it to get to that point where it would just fall the rest of the way nice and easy, it worked fine anyway but now i had a real challenge on my hands, holy crap this belt is tight, this new belt has the same size designation as the old belt but the old one is a little longer so i quickly switched to that one but still There was no way you could see if I put my belt on.

I first have to stretch the large pulley over this large edge of the small pulley, which is very difficult. The best option is to stretch the belt over the large pulley, but that is not possible because the pulley is right against the casting where these bumps are. The bumps are for an earlier version of Rodney that had six bolts around the outside to hold the lid on. In this case, they are unnecessary, so I made some free space. Oh, the little brass screws tightened the Rodney against the base of the lathe and these two are redundant. oil filler and drain plugs enough panning shots we already have a rodney to drive this thing is very heavy i'm sure you can expect a bad beard every time you ride rodney ok make sure we're at low speed yeah, three, two, one.

Well, let's try our best, everything seems fine, so let's stop wasting time, let's make some chips. I spilled some morse taper pliers. These things are hard to come by. I had to ask the UK for some metrics if anyone in New Zealand has any unwanted mt2. collets floating around please contact Rodney's spindle tip is the same as the mifids so in theory you could mount any Myford sized chuck here it activates the fine feed so I have no idea how much I'm feeding here Down, come on, oh, that's almost it. nothing speaks of an anticlimax more aggression is required yes look at it um mistakes were made so it turns out that first cut was about two millimeters deep and I didn't have the seat lock very well ah so it turns out that yes I really didn't tighten the vise, so it was about a third of a millimeter or let's say 15,000 and that was easy.

Let's try something more challenging. The slot is almost a millimeter deep, I mean, it's not a bridge port, but compared to using a vertical

milling

attachment

. on a lathe this is pretty cool, well it's not that pretty, how about some power feeding action? Oh yes, by the way, it's a two millimeter deep cut. Okay, I think that's it. Final thoughts after a short playthrough. What do I think of Rodney? You are much better off investing your money in a cheap tabletop router. Okay, listen to me. A Rodney is worth a good amount of coin. I think its value as a rare Myford collectible probably exceeds its actual value as a milling machine, so if you just want to make parts, any misguided old fool will stomp on Rodney, but maybe you're a Mifid enthusiast with money, compared to a vertical milling

attachment

, a Rodney is more capable and much more fun to use because everything is laid out flat, so there is We thank you all for watching, you will surely see Rodney in future videos.

I hope it was fun and I'll see you next time.