Mill - Mods & Upgrades – Lift Kit

Early on, I decided that the head clearance was pretty tight, so I started thinking about what I could do about it. It seemed a pretty straight-forward problem to solve; I just put a big piece of steel in between the base and the back. I gave it sides to stiffen it, but as always, I’m sure I am guilty of over-kill. 1-inch thick cold-rolled steel makes this probably the strongest, stiffest component on this whole contraption. Oh well, I picked it out of a scrap pile, so it didn’t cost much to build. My son, John machined it for me – really just a matter of cutting, surfacing, drilling and tapping it. I bought a bunch of #8 bolts and it went together like it was designed by someone who knew what he was doing or something! Ha!

I gave up an inch of forward reach, but I picked up 6 inches of vertical space. To my delight, I discovered that the back already accommodated far more travel than it could use, so without any other modification I increased my vertical head travel by an inch, but I picked up a whole 6 inches of vertical space. So I can put much larger work and tooling on it than before. I got this HUGE rotary table that could hardly fit on the table before (even without any tooling, Dang!) and now I can fit everything I can think of on the table.