Bridgeport Boss 5 Retrofit.

Does your spindle have a thru hole on the shaft?

I love my convert Boss but I do make one hell of a mess in the garage from the coolant system.

The Universal Quick Switch was a solid spindle. No through hole. I actually looked at my friends Boss 5 the other day and was talking to him about getting it running. He has a pair of HAAS mills and a HAAS twin spindle lathe with live tooling, but no Y-axis. So, the Boss is actually just taking up space. I bought back my Hardinge HNC that he had bought about 17 years ago from me, so I could probably get the mill. I was looking at it for a 4th axis engraving setup for some parts I help him with occasionally. His Boss has the Erickson Spindle, which is pretty strong, but the Universal collets were more precise in my experience. My Lagun has a chip tray that sits on top of the base and catches a lot of the chips, but I have thought about making an enclosure that would have an 1/8 inch plate welded to pads or rails almost like a pallet, and build a cabinet on top of that to fully enclose the machine, then just have a door or two to access it like a conventional CNC mill. You could put studs through the pads and bolt the machine to the pads. Better than the ancient Kearney and Trecker horizontals, which had a coolant dam around the table, but we used shower curtains on bent conduit around machine to keep the mess down.

I missed the notification for this post, but my spindle does have a though hole in it. I have read other say that they did not but mine does and a few other have them with the through hole. I have no idea if this is the spindle that mill shipped from the factory with but I do know that had been apart before I purchased the mill.

Does it use a drawbar, or the quick change nut on the bottom of the spindle? I will check Ed's machine today when I am up there. There really shouldn't need to be a hole in there. there are a lot of machines that used the NTMA style tapers and the drawbar with an air drawbar using air impact type arrangement when the drawbar went to tool change position, but most of the early Bridgeports used the quick release spinldle lower nuts. Some people liked the Erickson better because they were less prone rattling loose on heavy cuts. I never found it to be an issue for the Universal Kwik Switch, and for drilling, didn't find a need to wrench the closer. I did on milling, but still never had an issue with it.

It uses the nut on the bottom of the spindle to lock the tool. I like the fact that it has the through hole as I could use a drawbar if I needed to or wanted to. It is good to have options

eman50h, I know linuxCNC isn't the best place for the info, but do you happen to have schematics of how you modified your power supply, or a write-up in a different forum? I just started tearing into my machine and I'd really like to know which transformers and caps to keep, what your stepper voltage was, if you use just 1-4 for each of the motors to your Geckos, etc. I don't need step-by-step (though that would be awesome if it's out there somewhere) but knowing I'm on the right track would be great. I've spend hours searching and it seems, so far, the power supply is hard to find info on.

Thanks in advance!