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Beaver VBRP MK2 Vertical Milling Machine Head Parts

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If you need parts for a Beaver VBRP Vertical Milling Machine, you are in luck. We’ve been dealing with Dave at Hove Machine Services in Ontario, Canada for a while on different machines and manuals. He recently acquired a Beaver vertical milling machine, and he is parting out the head. He received the instructions and parts manual from us, which you will need here:

BEAVER VBRP MK2 Turret Milling Machine Instructions & Part Manual

If you do need parts for the Beaver Vertical Milling Machine, get the manual, and contact Dave at:

2031 River Rd W,
Wasaga Beach, ON, L9Z 2W1

705-429-5910

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10″x50″ Vertical Milling Machine Restoration Part: 2 Cleaning and Painting :Shop Projects

We are now ready to clean, paint, and restore our new Grizzly G4029 10×50 vertical milling machine. After finally getting the mill moved into our shop (Part 1), we kept the mill on the flat dolly to make it easier to move and paint until we figure out where it’s permanent home would be located.

This milling machine has never been used, but it had at least 5 year old cosmoline grease on it to prevent rusting. Some of it was so thick and gummy that we had to use some razor blades to scrape a lot of it off, and then we used some rags with the Super Tech lubricant that they sell at Walmart. It really helped loosen the cosmoline and helped with any small amounts of rust that did form. It’s just like WD-40, but cost less. We have ended up using it quite a bit with the machines in our shop.

We decided to take the time to sand, putty, and paint the entire mill. There were a lot of chips and scratches in the paint and casting putty from being stored and moved around the Grizzly warehouse for years. Plus, we aren’t big fans of the green paint. We disassembled every part except the knee. We sanded everything, and used the Bondo Lightweight Body Filler to fill in the chips and scratches.

  • Please Note: It is actually a good idea to disassemble spindles and critical parts of any Asian machine to clean them and grease/oil them properly. You may not believe the amount of grit and grime left from the manufacturing process in these. I would NEVER operate an Asian machine without doing this.
I like using this Bondo, because it states that it works with metal and steel, and it’s fairly easy to use and manipulate. I recommend building it up in layers on good size chips or holes (build and sand, build and sand). It’s nearly impossible to get it correct the first time for the paint.
Before we decided on the new color of our mill, we had to make some decisions about the milling head. The head to our G4029 mill had been cannibalized for parts over the years, which is a common practice at Grizzly on damaged machines. We decided the best option for our shop and time was to purchase a brand new head with the options we really need/want. I’ll discuss more about finding and ordering parts for these types of mills in the next article, but we ended up choosing the ACER E-Mill 3HP Variable Speed Head, which cost a little over $3,000. They are available in Bridgeport gray or beige.
We decided to go for the Bridgeport gray color. A good easily accessible paint that is very close to Bridgeport gray that we decided to use is Krylon “ColorMaster Classic Gray Spray Paint”. It is also available at Walmart. It goes on easily, and we have found it to be fairly durable in the shop.
Here are some pictures of the finished results. I’ll have a lot better pictures in the next article about parts and installation of the new mill head.

Do you have any products that you like to use during your machine restoration and painting? Or do you have any recommendations for me? Do you have any tips or tricks?

Please share in your comments below.
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10″x50″ Vertical Milling Machine Restoration Part: 1 Unloading :Shop Projects

We received a new 10″ x 50″ milling machine for our shop. It was part of a scratch and dent sale from Grizzly. The mill is a G4029 made in Taiwan. It had a bunch of scratches and dings, plus it was missing a few parts. The variable speed head had parts missing all over it. Something had slammed into the front of the machine damaging the Y-axis lead screw and the bearing bracket. We have a lot of the tools and parts so we are going to be able to fix it up for the price, and make it worth it.

We need a large mill in our shop with a lot of travel to finish some of the CNC machines we are working on, plus make other jigs we need in our shop. We will eventually get this bear of machine up and running with a 3HP variable speed drive head with a VFD from ACER, and add some glass scales with a DRO (Digital Read Out).

Now we are moving it inside. We had them take the arm and head off at Grizzly to make it easier to move, plus they needed a lot of work anyways. We aren’t going to use the original head, and we are going to re-putty and paint the milling machine gray.

We used our aluminum moving truck ramp off our loading dock to help. We were able to find a cart to put the body of the machine on, and to help us up the ramp we used a wench.

It took us a while to get the machine base onto the cart. We also had to brace up the ramp, because it was beginning to bend. I don’t have any picture of the milling machine on the ramp, because we were kind of busy at the time, if you know what I mean.

Stayed tuned. We will be continuing this project. We hope to have this mill up and running by the end of this year.
Do you have a similar project that you would like to share with us or our readers. Feel free to email us or comment below, and we can feature it on our Ozark Shop Talk.