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7x10, 7x12, 7x14 Mini-Lathe Information

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Enco 20" 1PH Square Column Geared Head Mill Drill (aka Rong-Fu 45 Mill Clone) - Mill Stand Assembly

After taking apart the RF45 clone for moving back to the shop, we then proceeded to assemble the stand where the mill would sit. We were hoping for a mill stand that came in one unit and was welded together. What we received was a flat box of sheet metal ready for assembly:

stand box front

And the back of the box:

rf45 stand back of box

As you can kind of see from the parts list, the sides are pre-spot-welded into individual units with the front and back and internal sheet metal plates to be bolted to make one stand. The assembly was easy. We had read reports that the stand was pretty weak, but found this one to be pretty decent.

Here's the label on the box:

rf45 stand label

It's model #09519919. Note that it's made in Taiwan. This would imply better quality than had it been made in China.

After opening up the box, we found the instruction sheet to yield some interesting clues as to the intended pairing of the mill with this stand:

rf45 stand instructions

Do you see what we see? It's for the RF-25/RF-30 mill/drills!? Well, since they're all basically the same, this should work out fine.

We wanted to bring your attention to a close-up picture of the stand's welds on one of the legs:

rf45 stand close-up

This is intended to show the spot welds and give a sense of the guage of sheet metal used. Believe us, the legs are certainly strong enough to hold hundreds of pounds of weight.

Once assembled, we put the drip tray on the stand and you now have the assembled mill/drill stand:

rf45 stand assembled

There's a little hole off to the upper right hand corner of the drip tray to collect fluids. The right hand side of the stand has a door which opens up to house a storage unit. Nothing fancy here.

All in all, despite our expectations that this stand would be too weak to hold a 700# mill, we have to say that it does quite a decent job at it.

Now that this is done, it's time to re-assemble the mill on the stand and take a closer inspection of its quality.

 

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