Barker Horizontal Mill Rebuild              Refinishing the Table

After cleaning the table and removing some rust on the top, I found several fairly deep gouges and dents.  I set it up on my mill and used a dial indicator the same way I tram the mill.  This allowed me to get the top as close to parallel with the mill table as possible.

I used a reinforced grinding disk mounted in the mill to 'surface grind' the table.   It took quite a while, but only took off about .002"  off of most of the top to get  top cleaned up.  There is still some ware on one end, where it looks like some fixtures had been mounted.

Now that it is flat again, it was time to do a little cosmetic touch to hide the deeper scratches and dings that were left.  I have always like the "frosting" effect you see on  some scraped surfaces.  Not only does this look nice its main reason is to provide small scratches in the surface to hold oil.  I have tried ,but don't have the talent to do this.  The alternative I use is a bolt with a flat ground head mounted in the mill.  Place a small piece of adhesive backed sand paper on the head.  Then moving the table in equal increments and just touching the sand paper to the surface makes very nice looking spiral marks.