Taig Mill: More Upgrades

I had a chance to do a bit more work to the Taig Mill. Along with the new motor I purchased a new X-axis leadscrew, adjustable backlash leadscrew nuts and a bearing block assembly.

The X-axis leadscrew had been damaged in shipping. The damage was not bad enough that it didn't work, but I wanted to get the adjustable backlash nuts to help reduce backlash and since I would have it apart I may as well change the leadscrew. The end of the leadscrew had been damaged enough such that it would probably not work with the CNC conversion later so it would have to be changed eventually regardless.

Changing the leadscrew was pretty simple. First turned unscrewed the two screws holding the bearing block on the end of the X-table. Then I turned the lead-screw out of the leadscrew nut. The leadscrew nut could then be replaced with the new adjustable backlash model. Prior to doing so I cleaned and oiled the gibbs and ways, since it was all exposed and easy to get at that point.











The next step was to remove the crank and the dial from the old leadscrew by first removing the hex nut. Be careful not to allow the key to fall out from the keyway in the shaft if you need to reuse it. It is small and can be very difficult to find on the garage floor. Not that I know, I am just assuming that this would be the case. I next placed the new bearing block on the new leadscrew and assembled the dial and crank onto the new leadscrew. The new leadscrew included a key, a washer and a lock-nut. I've read to be careful not to over-tighten then nut as this can damage the ball bearings in the bearing block. I therefore used care to tighten the nut only until I could feel no more slop in the assembly.













I did find that the key was a little oversized and needed to be filed to fit properly. Aside from that it all fit together quite nicely. One thing that I was disappointing in was the shallowness of the mark on the bearing block which one would use, in conjunction with the dial, to determine the travel of the table. If you look at the picture below you may barely be able to see what looks like a vertical scratch at the 12 o'clock position. This is not much more visible by eye than in the picture and I will have to try to scribe it more deeply later. I realize that this bearing block is intended to be used mainly on CNC machines, but if they were going to go to the trouble of marking it at all they may as well have done it deeply enough to be useful.

Once the leadscrew assembly was together I screwed it onto the X-axis table and slid the table into the ways. I then adjusted the ways until I could feel no play, but the table slid with little resistance. At this point I proceeded to thread the leadscrew into the leadscrew nut. I happened to have bought the 19" leadscrew, despite having the 18" table. This will allow me to upgrade the table size later, but it also allowed easier access to the leadscrew nut for backlash adjustment. I was able to have the table in the ways while having the nut exposed enough to adjust. This is done by loosening the set screw in the middle of the nut and turning the two screws one either side until they were snug. Then you back off of the outer screws by 1/4 turn and snug up the set screw. All said and done, I got the table assembled and backlash was down to about .003" which is way less than it was before. I believe that I can get a little more out if I really fiddle with it, but .003" is fine for manual work. I'll obsess about it once I convert to CNC.














Further improvements I intend to make are to replace the other two leadscrew nuts, and to make and install way covers. After that I'll have to tram everything up and I'll be ready to cut some more chips on her.

Taig Mill From Ebay: Update

I'm still chasing the backlash in the table. There seems to be as much as .012" on the y axis. It looks to me as though it is coming from the bearing blocks at the end of the leadscrews where the cranks are mounted. There doesn't appear to be any way to adjust this out. I ordered a new x axis leadscrew and a bearing block assembly as well as the CNC style leadscrew nuts which can be tightened to reduced backlash. I also ordered the 1/5Hp motor which should be an improvement over the 1/8Hp motor that is on it now. It only cost me $30 so I figured it was worth a try. As you can see in the picture below I also got around to wiring and mounting a switch to the Taig. The Taig motor came with a connector wired to it that happens to be the mate to the type of connector that plugs into a PC power supply. That made it really simple to use spare PC power cord to wire it up.


I also managed to wreck the test indicator that I was using to align the vise. I was cranking the handles to move the table to do something and I didn't remove the indicator before doing so. I tend to be really impatient and take shortcuts that end this way all too often. Luckily, the indicator was a $30 cheapy that I bought from littlemachineshop.com rather than a $200-$300 Starret or Brown and Sharp.
I did manage to machine a few pieces out of scrap aluminum that I got from work. I made a few t-slot nuts and two clamps to hold the vise down. In order to clamp the vise down to make those I ground some 1/4-20 carriage bolts to fit in the t-slots and made some clamps on the FDM machine at work. The FDM machine extrudes ABS plastic, so those clamps were not very strong and the vise walked at times, which is why I used them only to make new clamps.
Lee and I got together at his house the other Saturday. I loaded the bio-diesel processor into my truck and dropped it off in one of his garages. I presently have no diesels running, so the ambition to complete the processor is just not there. Lee now has my old Golf and a Rabitamino, so hopefully he'll find the time to get one of them going and the processor up and running too.
After we unloaded the processor we worked on fixing up an old drill press that Lee had because I had none and he had an extra laying around. The press had no power cord, no power switch, and the belt guard had no means of being mounted. Lee fashioned a quick and dirty power switch from a light switch that he hastily tore off of the wall of his garage. He then attached it using some scrap wood that was laying around. Lee doesn't pay much regard for aesthetics, but he gets results.

































The mount for the belt guard was a bit more refined as Lee was itching to show me his wood lathe and used it as an excuse to start it up. The drill press is based around a large pipe Lee turned a piece that would fit into the pipe. He then attached a few blocks of wood upon which the guard rests quite nicely. It isn't beautiful but it works better than the nothing that I had before.


I actually used the drill press to drill and tap the holes in the Taig column to mount the power switch. It was much nicer than drilling a crooked hole with the hand drill. I was also able to chuck the tap and turn it by hand to start the tap straight, thus reducing the likelyhood of breaking the tap. Well done, Lee. Thanks for the drill press.

Taig Mill from Ebay

I won an auction a little Taig mill on Ebay last Friday and it was delivered on Thursday. The packing left a little to be desired, but only because a UPS delivery requires that things be entirely encased in carbonite to protect them from the repeated drops and such that they inevitably encounter.

The mill didn't fair too badly, but the end of the x-axis lead screw was bent slightly and the nut on the end of it was a bit mangled. Everything seems to be alright, but I'm debating putting in a claim since it was insured.

Below is a picture of the mangled box that the mill came in and the end of the lead screw that was damaged. The lead screw does seem to drag a little on that end, so perhaps it will be worth calling UPS.













I did my best to clean the gibbs and ways and lead screws, and that made a big difference on the way that the mill table moves. Aside from the little bit of drag on the x axis where the lead screw was bent, the table moves pretty smoothly.

It looks as though this is on older version of the Taig mill, as the color is grey not blue and the gibbs use a different adjustment method than the ones that I have seen pictured elsewhere. I think that it will work just fine for me regardless. I do need to purchase a few items before I can do much with it. The vise that was included is pretty old and crappy. I will also need to buy some t-nuts and other means of holding work down.

The motor on the mill also doesn't appear to be the one currently sold with the mill. It has some problems spinning up with the belts in the highest speed position. It seems that the motor lacks the low speed torque to get the spindle going unless the belt is in the positions that give it a lower gear ratio. I'll see if I can come up with a remedy for that. The motor also came wired directly to a power cord, without a power switch in between. I intend to get a suitable switch for it eventually but for now I came up with a temporary solution. My garage only has a single outlet in it and it is not near where I want to use the mill. There is, however, a switch that goes to an outdoor outlet near where the mill is that I was able to easily tap into to add and outlet that I can switch on and off in the meantime.

I'm looking forward to getting this thing up and going. I have a few designs for LED bike lights that I intend to make with it. I'll post the designs when I get around to it.

Bike Light Build: Part Three - Milling around

I've never really used a milling machine before, aside from using it as a glorified drill press. I decided that the bike light project was worth giving it a try. I needed to mill a 1/8" thick piece of aluminum into a 7/8" square. It was a pretty unambitious job, but you need to learn to walk before you can run, right? I won't go into a ton of detail about how I did it and whatnot, since I am by no means approaching being an expert. I am, in fact, the opposite. I know just enough to not hurt myself. Not this time anyway.

I was actually surprised at how easily the aluminum cut on the Bridgeport. My few previous attempts at milling had pretty poor results as I was trying to cut steel with dull end mills and absolutely no clue what I was doing. I have since learned a bit more of the proper technique. I still struggle with knowing which direction the slides move when you turn the handles, but I assume that I have the capacity to learn that with more experience.

I will detail later what this piece will be used for. Right now I'm just going to bask in the glow of knowing that I turned handles on a Bridgeport and got more than a squealing noise, hot discolored chips, and a mangled piece of scrap from the endeavor.

Bike Light Build: Part Two

I got around to playing with the light and the bench power supply last night and it appears that the light shows little or no dimming until the voltage drops below 12V. This means that in mild/warm temperatures I could possibly use NiMh batteries two, without going to the added trouble of buying two 8.4V packs instead of the standard 7.2V packs. At least that is what I have gleaned from wikipedia's information on NiMH batteries. The only other concern is the amperage draw, but I think that the sub-C size cells found in RC battery packs can handle the 500mA draw of the light, and then some.

Today I started building the body of the light with 1" square aluminum tubing that I bought at the hardware store down the road. I started with a 2" long section, which I then notched out so that a 7/8" long section of square tube could be held inside the notch.

I did this by first using a hacksaw to slit down the sides of the tube adjacent to the inner wall, up to a line that I had scribed one inch down the tube.


Next I drilled holes in the tube along the side of the scribed line where I wanted to remove material.


I then used a pair of vice-grips to break off the material at the line of drilled holes.


The next step is to file the bottom and sides flat. Then a piece of square tube is cut to 7/8" and filed to fit into the notch.

I was going to use a piece of aluminum extrusion intended to be a shelf braket as heat sinks, but then I remembered that I had some PC heat sinks that I never used on the PC in our office. I proceeded to cut those to two inches long and added a chamfer on one top corner. The picture below shows the pieces placed together as I intend them to fit.


I also placed an order with Newegg.com for some Arctic Alumina adhesive(AAA). AAA is thermally conductive, commonly used to attach heat sinks to CPU's and such. It has a good reputation for being a tough adhesive too, so I will at the very least use it to adhere the LED and heat sinks to the body. I will probably use JB Weld for more structural joints.

Next up we will finish constructing the body...

Bike Light Build: Part One

Just a few quick note about my latest project. I'm hoping to actually document this one in a useful manner, so bear with me. I've done a little bit of research about DIY lights for mountain biking and finally decided to get around to making one. Fall is upon us and soon there will be little to no chance that we will see the sun for months on end. I will therefor need something to light my path while biking.

I had considered going the cheap route of using a halogen light, but the run time is abysmal compared to other options, such as LED and HID. HID is simply stupid expensive, so I decided to go with an LED. After reading a website all about such lights here, I decided to go with a Cree MC-E emitter from ledsupply.com. The MC-E is actually four emitters closely packed together under one lens and it comes pre-mounted on an aluminum plate to help dissipate heat. The emitters are wired in series which means the forward voltages must be added together, resulting in a Vf of 12.8-13.2. The current is shared by the emitters and I will supply that with a Luxdrive Buckpuck with which I can provide a regulated 500 mA. I chose the wired model, with the potentiometer to vary the current from 0-100%.

To test the Buckpuck and LED I soldered some speaker wires that I scrounged from a box of stereo stuff I had in the closet. I put some alligator clips on those to aid in testing as well. I wired the Buckpuck to my regulated power supply and set the PS to 14.4V which is the voltage that I can get from two 7.2V Ni-Cd battery packs that I bought for my remote control car, when they are wired in series. I then attached the clips on the LED to the Buckpuck outputs and turned on the PS. Voila! Blinding frigging light. Seriously, don't look directly at this thing. At 350 mA this LED throws approximately 430 Lumens and I was driving it at 500 mA which should give it a 30% increase in flux. That is truly bright. I didn't leave the light on for long as it was not attached to any heat sinks and even an LED will heat up when driven at 6.5 watts. I just wanted to verify that everything worked anyway.

Next step... check to see how low a voltage this thing can be driven at so that I can be sure that the battery packs I have will work even when low, or if I need something with more than a nominal 14.4V.

Be vewy quiet, I'm hauling wabbit

I finally got around to hauling the Rabbit up to Maine for Jon to do some work on. It has been in Lee's barn for about 4 years now. In that that time it grew some mold on the interior and provided sanctuary for countless mice. Overall I think that is it very salvageable. Jon will put it on the lift and determine whether or not I am right. I didn't get a chance to try and start the bunny. Instead I scrubbed the mold off of the interior and vacuumed the mice nests out of the engine compartment and glove box. The battery was too far gone to even take a charge and I didn't have time to check the airbox to see if the mice had taken up residence in there as well. Jon will just have to do me the huge favor of doing that for me if he decides that it is worth the hassle.

I neglected to take pictures of the mouse nests, but below is a picture of the mold growing on the driver's side door panel.

I also didn't take pictures of the interior after I washed it, but it cleaned up pretty well. I used a mixture of water, bleach and dishwashing liquid. I wore a respirator while doing this too lessen the likelyhood of getting a respiratory infection. Hopefully it was worth the trouble. I'll post Jon's diagnosis as we go.

How to make waxed cloth

The wife found a project that she wanted to try doing and she enlisted my help, as usual. What she wanted to do was to make a product that she had seen online. The product was essentially cloth replacements for ziploc bags. These bags are to be waterproof, machine washable, and most importantly, pretty looking. Apparently, the products that she had seen had used a vinyl liner to waterproof them. As far as I know, vinyl is not a heathy substance to have near food as it offgasses formaldehyde. I informed her of this and she did some research to find alternatives. After shooting down all of the synthetic fabrics that popped up we decided on waxed cotton. Impregnating organic cotton with beeswax seemed like a very nontoxic and eco-conscious fabric to use.
I'm far too lazy to find the website where we found the instructions for impregnating the fabric with wax, but I will show here how it was done by us.


The first step is to cut a piece of craft paper, or a brown paper bag, and aluminum foil at least as long as the piece of cloth, and at least twice as wide. You want to be able to fold the foil and paper like a soft taco to with the foil and paper in lieu of tortilla, and the cloth and wax in lieu of delicious taco meat. MMMmmm tacos....


The next step is to evenly spread wax shavings on top of the cloth. We did this by using a crappy steak knife to scrape wax off of the big block and onto the cloth.


Next fold the taco... I mean foil and paper around the cloth and use an iron on medium heat to melt the wax. We found that if you go very slowly it gives the cloth time to soak up the wax and impregnates it more evenly. Quickly remove the cloth and allow to cool. Voila! Waterproof fabric that won't leach death into your food.

Up next... Adventures in sewing

This is a total sausagefest

I decided to make a kielbasa, since I know that my father in law likes it so much.  I used a recipe that I found online, but I made a few adjustments to it.  For one, I halved the recipe because ten pounds of sausage is a lot to make at once, especially if you’ve never made it before.  For another, I reduced

the water by a quarter of a cup and substituted a few ounces of brandy.  I also added a few tablespoons of paprika and I used collagen casings instead of natural casings so that my wife wouldn’t vomit when she saw them.  Also, Alton brown says that they are easier to work with, and what AB says is gospel in this house.

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at making sausage for a while now.  I even put a Kitchenaid meat grinder and sausage stuffer attachment on my wedding registry, much to the bemusement of my wife.  Whatever, she got a waffle maker and the Kitchenaid ice cream maker attachment, and I do 99% of the cooking.  I finally got around to actually making a batch of sausage today.  I promised my father in law and all of the other guys that I am going snowshoeing with next weekend that I would make some to go with the Belgian Dubbel I made, so I was committed to it. 

The Kitchenaid grinder attachment and sausage worked pretty well.  I did have a problem with the grinder plates getting clogged up.  I’m thinking that they clogged up with the connective tissue from the fat and rind.  I made a special effort to mix the fatty pieces in with the meat more thoroughly so that the meat could push the fatty pieces through, thus clearing the grinder plate.  It seemed to work pretty well, as I had no more clogs.  

Now there is just one more step to the sausage saga and that is smoking.  I got a stovetop smoker for X-mas and intend to use it to smoke the sausages on the trip this weekend.  I have not used the smoker yet so hopefully it works well.  The little bit of sausage that I fried up and tasted today was damn good, so smoking it sure as hell can’t hurt. 

Rebuilding a Digital Safe

 

I got a Mossberg digital hotel safe from work after it failed to function and we had to find a more creative way to open it.  From what I could see everything seemed to function alright so I assume the failure was one of the integrated circuits.  Regardless, I’ve decided that I want to rebuild it using an arduino.  The control board features a 16X2 LCD display and a 3X4 matrix keyboard.  Both of these should be fairly easy to get to work since there are arduino libraries available for them.  I just need to figure out how the hell to use the libraries.  That, and the little task of determining the pinouts on the LCD.

I downloaded the datasheet for the Hitachi HD44780A00 and then I used a continuity tester to find what pins went where.

 

The pinout seems to be pretty straight forward.  I will probably use a 4-bit LCD library due to the fact that the arduino has only 14 digital Input/Output and there simply wouldn’t be enough pins for an 8-bit configuration plus a 3X4 matrix keyboard, and the two limit switches and motor that are used to lock the safe. 

The keypad itself was pretty simple to determine it’s pinout as all of the traces on the circuit board are easy to trace by eye.  It turns out that the top three pins are for the rows, from top to bottom, and the remaining four are the columns, from right to left.

Test of Windows Live Writer

Testing…

I saw a post on lifehacker.com about Windows Live Writer, so I decided to give it a try.  So far it seems to be easier to use than the Blogger interface which can be tedious and buggy.  For a free service Blogger is excellent, but if there is a way to improve it then I may as well try. 

Verdict:

The interface responds pretty quickly and there are some pretty nifty ways to manipulate photos such as the rounded corners on the pictures above.  The first time that I posted the text and picture above the text was nearly obscured by the photo.  It was simple to adjust the margins to fix that so overall I’d say that I’m pretty happy with it, in spite of it being a Microsoft product.

Dubbel Track Kegged

I finally got around to kegging the Dubbel Track Ale this weekend. The original gravity was around 1.065 according to the Northern Brewer website from which I bought the ingredient kit. I'm not sure if it came out to be exactly that as my hydrometer was broken when I brewed the beer, so I'll have to trust Northern Brewer. I purchased a new hydrometer and measured the final gravity to be 1.011. Using the instruction that came with the the hydrometer this indicates that the alcohol content to be approximately 7-7.5% by volume. Using the formula ABV = (OG -FG)*131 that I found on the Beeradvocate.com I narrowed it down to 7.074%. I hope that this doesn't indicate that the beer didn't fully ferment because the ABV was supposed to be around 7.5%. I tasted it after I kegged it and it was pretty good, so I guess that it all that really matters.

Really Bare Bones Board Build

I purchased an RBBB(Really Bare Bones Board) from Modern Device Company quite some time ago and I never quite got it to work right. The RBBB is a VERY minimalist version of the Arduino which is easy to put on a solderless breadboard. The kit cost $7 but you have to solder it together, including some very small components, so it can be chalenging if you are new to soldering, and damn near impossible if you have a crappy Radio Shack soldering iron. I had purchased a $150 Weller iron prior to the build, so I had nothing but inexperiance and lack of skill to blame for my troubles.

I actually managed to get the more difficult components soldered on without a problem but I somehow managed to overheat one of the pads on the pcb and I lost a connection to ground because of that. The board would work it was positioned just right such that the pad made contact, but it failed more often than not.

Tonight while working on the Xbees I decided that I should finally get around to fixing this so I came up with a rather inelligant, yet effective solution. While it is difficult to see in the photo, The pin that has the bad connection is the ground pin that I soldered the Pin 13 LED to. I must have spent too much time heating that pad up because I was trying to mount the LED to it. Regardless, my rather hoaky fix was to solder a wire onto the to of that pin and stuff the other end of that wire into the DIP socket of the corresponding AVR pin. I checked the continuity with my multimeter and lo and behold it worked without needing me to wiggle the pin until it could chance upon a connection. I proceeded to check the rest of the leads and found them all to be working, so perhaps I'll actually get to use the RBBB for a project sometime in the future.

Xbee Communication Part 1: Getting Started

I have spent my free time in the past few days playing with Xbee wireless modules. I move at a snail's pace because I'm terrible at managing my time effectively. I did manage to get the two modules to communicate. Not bad for like three intermittent hours of work. I spent a few celebratory minutes typing messages between the two before I decided to start making dinner.

The first step to working with the Xbees, aside from ordering the parts from Sparkfun.com, was to solder the breakout boards and wire the circuits up on breadboards. I managed to miss the recommendation that you purchase the 2mm sockets with the breakout board so that you can change the Xbee modules at a later date so I ended up soldering them directly to the breakout boards.

I also purchase a logic level converter from Sparkfun in order to step down the voltage of the serial data lines from the arduino to the Xbee from 5V to 3.3V. I had to solder header pins on this as well, but the SMD chips were already on the PCB so I didn't have to do the painstaking work of soldering those tiny things on myself.

I ran into a few problems getting the Xbees to respond to my serial commands. The first problem was that I seemed to have the TX and RX lines reversed. I could have sworn that they we wired as the diagram in Making Things Talk showed, but my mind often wanders from the page to the breadboard, so I could have been wrong. The second problem was just the fact that I had multiple serial terminals open at the same time. This resulted in some error messages or the terminals simply not responding at all. Personally, I prefer the error message, even if I didn't bother reading it.

I chatted with Lee about the problem at work and he told me about the conflict with multiple serial terminals and I was able to fix the problem as soon as I knew to only do one at a time. Now that I have the two talking I need to figure out a project where they might be useful. I'm sure that I'll think of something eventually. At least I've taken the first baby steps though.

Driving a unipolar stepper with the Arduino

I decided to get around to playing with the Arduino again. I had a few unipolar stepper motors laying around so I decided that it was about time that I figured out how to interface them with the Arduino. The first hurdle was figuring out how to wire the motors. All three of the steppers are five wire unipolar, but none of them have wires. They all have PCB's with connectors on them. I had a connector or two that I took out of an HP printer so I just had to figure out which wire did what.

Finding the center tap on the motors was easy enough as you do so by using an ohmmeter to check the resistances between pairs of wires. The common power wire will be the one with only half as much resistance between it and all the others. Finding the order of the remaining four wires in the end required good old fashioned trail and error.

When I finally figured it out I made sure to label the wires. The wiring order worked on all three steppers, two of which are Mitsumi's and the third is a Minebea.

It was easy enough to get the stepper to turn once the wiring order was determined. The Arduino stepper library provides a pretty simple method of doing so. The Arduino website gives adequate instruction on figuring out how to use it so I won't bother documenting it again. I just figured that it might be helpful to post a picture of the wiring order that I found to be shared among the steppers that I have so that I may spare someone else the effort of figuring it out in the future.

Toolbox organization

I purchased a new Craftsmen tool chest to hold my ever expanding tool collection, as well as to free my old toolbox to use for bike specific tools. I was unhappy with the lack of organization on my old toolbox. Whenever I opened a drawer tool would roll around and get all mixed up, especially my sockets as they are round and roll quite efficiently.
The first step that I took in preventing tools from rolling and sliding was to line the drawers with something that had a non-slip surface. My toolbox had foam drawer liners but they didn't really have the grip necessary to do anything more than simply protect the paint of the toolbox. I found some Con-tact brand shelf liner at Home depot that claimed to be quite grippy and when I touched it I felt that it seemed much more promising than the liners offered by Sears.
I cut the liner using a utility knife and some flooring that was leftover from my basement remodel as a cutting guide. The flooring had a cork backing that made a nice cutting surface that didn't dull the tip of my knife, and it had a nice straight edge to guide the knife with.
After the drawers were lined(Except for one as I did my math wrong and didn't get enough liner. Doh!) I wanted to make sure that I had somethign to really prevent the sockets from rolling around. I remembered that I had some Komplement drawer divider in the garage that we had forgotten to return with the Hopen wardrobe that we assembled, only to find that our ceilings were are too short to fit it. I had to modify the drawer dividers to fit and to separate the multitude of different types of sockets that I have. I used a utility knife to do this. I feel as though a small hand saw would be much better for this, but I lack such a saw, so the utility knife was what I used. The most difficult part was cutting the notches that interlock the dividers in place. The dividers are thin plywood with three plys and the middle ply was difficult to get though with the knife, but I managed. All things considered, it came out pretty well. I do want to cut the height of the dividers that run horizontally in the shelf, in order to make it easier to get to the tools in the back of the drawer and to add some labels to let me quickly see what the sockets are in each compartment. Aside from that I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

Xmas present for my sister

My sister has said for years that she would ride a bike if I found her one with a banana seat. This year for Christmas I did just that. I happened to mention to my friend Lee that I was hoping to find such a bike to give to my sister and he happened to have one in his basement. Lee has one of everything, by the way. I did some research and determined that the bike was a Ross Barracuda, made in the late sixties to early seventies.
The bike needed a bit of work, but it was in pretty good condition overall. I disassembled pretty much everything, down to the wheel hubs, and cleaned, polished or replaced anything that needed it. I decided not to go to the effort of repainting the frame as the many little rust spots gave it character, in my opinion. The only things that I ended up buying, in addition to the bike, were a bottom bracket and tires. Luckily I found a bottom bracket at Harris Cycle and tires on Amazon. Whitewalls kick ass. Below is the "after" picture. I thought it came out pretty nice and my sister seemed to agree as she jumped up and down in the driveway as I unloaded the bike from the car.