Interesting to see – the ‘5 thou quill feed’ was probably a useful mod. in the days before DRO, but clearly required some dedication in the manufacture..

..tend to forget, nowadays, how widespread & popular these machines once were..

We have a Taiwanese one at the museum, more accurate than the Tom Senior. A variation of  the quick head locking for both bolts at once that I have not seen before. There have been many different designs for sycronising the locking which turn up regularly on the forums over the pond, even chain and sprockets have been used. The fine feed for the quill may have been added for a particular job, I rely on the added DRO for our mill as the worm wheel has variable backlash as it does not run as straight as it should, so the Taiwanese did not get it exactly right.

..If necessity is the mother of invention, a well-furnished scrapbox is the often the nuptual bed..

This was the mill I had in mind. One came up for sale used many years ago for a good price. Sadly too far away for me.

”However, they also made at least one proper, complete and very effective bench-top vertical milling/drilling machine, the Type BST-23.  Weighing some 342 kg, the Ixion milling and drilling was very heavily built and modelled along lines established by Taiwanese and Korean makers – whose inexpensive and now ubiquitous Mill/Drills began to appear on the market in the early 1970s.”

https://www.lathes.co.uk/ixion/

A nice looking machine.

This was the critical feature the Chinese didn’t copy for some reason.

On 23 October 2025 at 21:54 southernchap Said:

Ah, so with the Ixon, the head and column are, in normal use, kept clamped together, the rack is fixed to the column, and the column moves up and down (downwards into the base).

That’s different.

I believe this is the way the Korean mills operated as well.