Bridgeport milling machines have a special appeal for me since I built my award winning 1/5 scale model back in 1997. I have now built a second model Bridgeport, but this time it is the ultimate in miniatures at 1/14 scale. This has to be the smallest working BRJ made to date. The overall height of 7.800 inches is from the base to the top of the motor case. Inside the case is an extremely small Swiss made electric motor. This is rated at 1.5 volts, but I am running it on a 3 volt battery concealed in the base. In the earlier stages of building the model I did consider having the motor in the base alongside the battery pack. This would have allowed a larger, more powerful motor to be used. However, because I wanted flexible movement of the head in all directions and the sliding ram to function as in the full size machine, I soon concluded that this idea was totally impossible to produce in this scale, so I reverted back to mounting the motor in the correct location as in the full-size prototype.
To complement the model I have also made a machine vice and a matching rotary table .800 inches in diameter. The small table has a ration of 60:1. Two miniature T-bolts secure the rotary table to the machine. To cut the actual T-slots, I had to make the milling cutters myself as no commercial equivalent miniature cutters are available.
Building this miniature was a challenge which I enjoyed executing to prove a point. Jerry Keiffer's beautiful little models (which appeared at Olympia in 1998) were such an inspiration to me that I had to try to emulate his excellent craftsmanship and show that we British are as capable of precision engineering projects as our American friends. I do not intend to do any further work in this scale as the parts are too fragile to make working models. Any future projects will be in my preferred 1/5 scale.
