Well contrary to the last paragraph on the previous page, it didn't take me a short while to get this beast finished, it took nearly two more years! So to those of you who have been hanging out waiting for this, sorry for the delay.....

Today I realised that to complete another project i would need to mill some dovetail ways, well that would need a mill, so I said to myself, what *really* needs to be done to finish the drill/mill convertion?

Having recently had to replace the spindle bearings in the drill press gave me the opertunity to bore out the spindle nose to take 3/8" Welldon shanked milling cutters, I knew I was almost done, all that was still to be done was machining the throats of the T slots and truing up the table face, and assembling the vertical adjustment feed screw, tidying up a few other loose ends like puting, all the hand wheels etc back in place and cleaning up the machine's work space and puting it in it's final location.

So today I milled out the T-slot throats, and in a fit of masochism I desided that seeing as I already had my hands dirty I might as well do the face, famous last thoughts there, Iit only took me about 40 mins to do the slots, but the rest of the DAY to do the face, mind you it does look good now that it done!

Here is what the nearly finished machine looks like.



As you can see the vertical feed screw isn't present, nor is the right hand handwheel, you can also see that the area is a real bomb site, but now that the machine is kinda finished I can finally clean up the area, build a tooling rack and so on.

Here is a close up of the table and spindle nose.



If you want to see a close up of this, just click the above image.

You will note that the table isn't perfectly flat, this is OK by me, seeing as it is still very flat, by home built standards, and the fact that this was done by the machine itself. You might also notice that the outer most T-slot isn't full length, this is because I have to reassemble the other hand wheel to get the feed to get to the far end, and I haven't done that yet, but it is only 4mm to cut so it's not a major task to do over the next couple of days.

Please not that I have removed the drill chuck, this is because they are lousy at holding milling cutters, and have a habit of coming off at speed, when you least expect them to. The screw sticking out the side is only temporary, it will be replaced with a M5 grub screw to keep off axis weight down, but is used to lock the cutters into the spindle.

I will post a final couple of pictures when I get the last couple of bits done, I hope this will be soon, but I won't make any promises. I tend to jump from project to project so....

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