Welding Tips and Tricks

Hey y’all!

I know this is a welding forum but are there any machinists in the crowd? I have a heavy duty drill press in my shop and it seems like I should be able to do some milling with it. Just basic stuff at least, key ways in drive shafts, slotted bolt holes etc. The press has 6 speeds, power down feed, forward/reverse. And it does say Mill/Drill on it so me thinks I should be able to do the above. What would I need to get in order to be able to? Cross feed table I assume, and also what basic bits would i need to get started?

I grew up on the farm but only got into fabricating the last 2 years or so. My grandpa and his brother bought most the equipment here, his brother was kinda like me, ready to try anything, wanting to learn. He passed 5 years ago but all his stuff is still here and I’m always finding new things he had stored away and trying to figure out what they’re for. Like an old TIG torch I found on a shelf last year that I learned on before I got my little SW200. Tons of different welding rods that I assume are for O/A welding (next on my list of things to learn). Some of them were in labeled boxes so Google told me what they are. But there’s a package of golden ones I have no idea what they are. Some kind of brass maybe? No stamps on them, nothing. More yellow than Sil Bronze. I’ll probably toss them unless you guys wanna guess what they are. There’s abou 20 1/8 rods like that.

Thanks for the help! Have a good day guys and gals

That is half a milling machine, as it lacks the cross feed table. But as a drill , it's great. You won't get better. Well it's not an Swedish Arborga , the worlds best, but I would bet it's a Taiwanese Rong Fu. Also a high quality gearhead.

Downwindtracker2 wrote:That is half a milling machine, as it lacks the cross feed table. But as a drill , it's great. You won't get better. Well it's not an Swedish Arborga , the worlds best, but I would bet it's a Taiwanese Rong Fu. Also a high quality gearhead.

Are there cross feed tables available to add onto something like this? A good quality one, nothing flimsy. Where would I look?

Downwindtracker2 wrote:That is half a milling machine, as it lacks the cross feed table. But as a drill , it's great. You won't get better. Well it's not an Swedish Arborga , the worlds best, but I would bet it's a Taiwanese Rong Fu. Also a high quality gearhead.

Good guess by the way!!

From the drill bits you have, it looks like it has an Morse Taper #3 ??, quil. Great for drilling ,but harder to find collets for holding end mills. They are available, though. The R-8 taper is more less the standard.

What twigged me to it being a Rong Fu is the grey paint on the face. It's the same shade of grey as my Advance RF-45 mill/drill. The RF stands for Rong Fu, the Advance is just a house brand.

Years back I bought a small cross feed table to do light duty milling on my drill press, not recommended BTW, from BusyBee. BusyBee is Grizzly in Canada. They are still available from Grizzly and are commonly used for positioning on drill presses.

You have a nice gearhead drill press there. I think the Swedish ones are north of $5000 new.

The bearing structure won't take the side load of milling for long.

JayWal wrote:Hey y’all!
But there’s a package of golden ones I have no idea what they are. Some kind of brass maybe? No stamps on them, nothing. More yellow than Sil Bronze. I’ll probably toss them unless you guys wanna guess what they are. There’s abou 20 1/8 rods like that.

From the picture, they appear to be Oxy welding rods, 15% Silver (Ag being the periodic symbol for Silver). You might hang onto them, because you never know what you'll get into in the future...

Franz you dead wrong. The bearings on my drill press are 6200 series. They are much better at radial loads than axial loads. On the old American made ones, they likely had a thrust bearing, but on the imported clones of the Japanese style drill presses I've seen they just use a deep race ball bearing.But what can be a problem, is the loosening of the chuck arbor. That's why I don't recommend it. On his, he has a draw bar

Franz© wrote:The bearing structure won't take the side load of milling for long.

I know that’s a problem with doing that with regular drill presses but this is built with a big heavier than regular press, I do have a smaller one. The quill or spindle whatever it’s called is 2 inch diameter and the big one is 3 inch. And after hours of digging I found the owners manual The specs do give max end mills recommendations.

cj737 wrote:

JayWal wrote:Hey y’all!
But there’s a package of golden ones I have no idea what they are. Some kind of brass maybe? No stamps on them, nothing. More yellow than Sil Bronze. I’ll probably toss them unless you guys wanna guess what they are. There’s abou 20 1/8 rods like that.

From the picture, they appear to be Oxy welding rods, 15% Silver (Ag being the periodic symbol for Silver). You might hang onto them, because you never know what you'll get into in the future...

What would rods like that be used to weld generally?

cj737 wrote:

JayWal wrote:Hey y’all!
But there’s a package of golden ones I have no idea what they are. Some kind of brass maybe? No stamps on them, nothing. More yellow than Sil Bronze. I’ll probably toss them unless you guys wanna guess what they are. There’s abou 20 1/8 rods like that.

From the picture, they appear to be Oxy welding rods, 15% Silver (Ag being the periodic symbol for Silver). You might hang onto them, because you never know what you'll get into in the future...

Actually the package in the pic is silicon bronze tig rod. 15%. I put them beside the rod I’m wondering about for comparison. Sorry for not clarifying! My bad!

JayWal wrote:

cj737 wrote:

JayWal wrote:Hey y’all!
But there’s a package of golden ones I have no idea what they are. Some kind of brass maybe? No stamps on them, nothing. More yellow than Sil Bronze. I’ll probably toss them unless you guys wanna guess what they are. There’s abou 20 1/8 rods like that.

From the picture, they appear to be Oxy welding rods, 15% Silver (Ag being the periodic symbol for Silver). You might hang onto them, because you never know what you'll get into in the future...

Actually the package in the pic is silicon bronze tig rod. 15%. I put them beside the rod I’m wondering about for comparison. Sorry for not clarifying! My bad!

They look like the brazing rod I used with oxy acetylene. Not flux coated,you just dipped the end in the flux jar while you worked.

They look like the brazing rod I used with oxy acetylene. Not flux coated,you just dipped the end in the flux jar while you worked.[/quote]

i assumed something to do with oxy. there were some flux coated brazing rods too so you could be right. thanks!