ZX45 Benchtop Mill

... early in the year 2016, when I've decided to buy a new milling maschine.

My existing maschine, a tiny RF-25 benchtop mill, was a bit annyoing and too small. With it's round column it was more a drillpress with a crosstable than a real milling maschine.

So I've decided to buy a new maschine. When it's about milling maschines, my dream was always to own a rather big german industrial maschine like a Deckel FP Series or maybe even better a Thield Duplex 158 or 159. But as the available space in my homeshop is quite limited, I had to stick to something smaller (a Deckel FP1 would have been small enough but the maschines in good condition were rare and quite expensive).

Searching for a suitable industrial maschine was quite frustrating and therefor I decided to change my search to new maschines from china.

A good reference was a thread in the german maschinist forum "zerspanungsbude.net" where a fellow maschinist wrote about his considerations on buying a new maschine. He decided to buy a RF-45 clone from Optimum named MB4. This maschine looked quite massive for a benchtop maschine and so I've focused my search on this type of mill.

There is a hole bunch of distributors who sells clones of this milling maschine. Each distributor paints and names his maschine a bit different but the maschines itself vary at most in some small details.

I found a maschine dealer not far away who had such a clone and decided to visit him to view the maschine in real. The maschine looked quite ok and the price was also acceptable, so I've made the deal and bought the maschine.

The maschine arrived a few days later:

Here are some bad highlights:

After the initial cleanup and revision of the maschine I've build everything together, aligned the column and started to work with the maschine.

It took not quite a long time until I made some modifications.

I found it rather annoying to count the revolutions of the dial when moving the table, so I decided to buy a DRO for the maschine. The DRO is labled as "Ditron" and so are the glasscales which have a resolution of 5/1000 mm.

Here are some pictures of the scales mounted to the maschine:

Another early modification was the depth stop for the quill. The original one was just a crappy screw and far from being accurate or even handy. The maschine is equipped with an automatic threading mode which means that the depth stop of the quill triggers the reversing of the spindle. I wanted this to work reliable and as accurate as possible.

The hole in the casting where the original depth stop goes through was nearly 20mm so I decided to ream it to 20H7 and stick a precision ground rod through it as an replacement for the old screw. The rod is of course connected to the quill. The depth stop is a piece of brass that slides on the rod an can be clamped to it. For the bottom stop I glued a piece of flat faced cast iron with some 5 min. epoxy onto the raw casting.

Later on, I've broken the blue clamping ring that connects the depth stop to the quill, so I had to build a new one:

I was quite happy with the maschine and worked quite a time without changing a thing.

At some day my brother in law bougth a hole bunch of 3-phase motors with an attached gearbox, frequency drive and a magnetic brake and gave me one of them. I decided to use it as power feed for the z axis.

To do so I had to change the upper bearing of the z spindle and I had to extend the spindle itself to be able to mount a toothed belt disc to it.

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