Hah. I have a machine that was affectionately known as "Big Red" by the small community of its owners. There used to be a Yahoo group devoted to it, but I don't know if any such group is still active. I looked through old pictures and could only find a couple that showed the whole thing:
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In terms of design, it is a round-column mill drill, but somewhat less capable than the familiar Rong-Fu style. Rather than the head of the mill traveling up and down the column, the column itself moves up and down in the base. It has a Morse 2 taper rather than an R8. Originally it was set up with a two-belt style speed selection - maybe 9 speeds? 12? I don't recall exactly, but years ago I converted it to use a treadmill motor (apparently after both of those pictures above, since they still show the original motor in place). I kept some of the pulleys and the two belts so that I could change ratios to get increased torque at slow speeds or vice-versa, but for the most part I just use the speed control knob.
Other enhancements that I made over the years included a way to lock the head to the column more securely so that it couldn't move off line under heavy cutting pressure. (The head is made to be able to swing to the left or right, and the factory method of securing it is simply a couple of clamp bolts.) I also added a fine-feed control to the quill, and a quill "DRO" - actually just a modified 6" electronic caliper, but it worked very well, other than using batteries faster than I would have liked. The latter two modifications are visible in the pictures above.
In terms of capacity, it is not as large a table as a Rong-Fu, but is larger than the "mini-mills" that were the next step down from a Rong-Fu type mill-drill. The table does have one really irritating characteristic: the table screws are 6 tpi. Yes, that's right - slightly better than a 7 tpi screw, but far worse than a 5 or 8 or 10 tpi. It would have benefited from an X/Y DRO, but I never got around to fitting one; instead I got very good at determining how many times to turn the dial and where on the dial with 166.666666 divisions I needed to wind up.
And in fact, despite its limitations and drawbacks, I used it for many years to accomplish a wide variety of projects with a pretty high degree of accuracy. A few years ago I saw a good deal on a Bridgeport and bought it, but I kept the mill drill, thinking I would find it useful to have a second mill, or even that I might set it up primarily for precision drilling and power tapping - the treadmill motor can be instantly reversed. As it turns out, I haven't used it even once since I got the BP ... so I really should let it go to someone who needs a starter mill. At that point the only responsible thing to do would be to use the space freed up to add another tool. Right? Right?
