Getting a small milling machine

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SouthPaw700

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Hi guys, this isn't really a specific gunsmithing question, but I thought this would be the most knowledgeable thread to ask in. I am looking to get a small milling machine. I've never had one before, so I'll be doing some learning for sure. Starting out the main purposes will be stuff like inletting homemade stocks, perhaps trying some stuff with aluminum like making my own trigger guard etc. I know the knee mills are the cats meow, but what about something like this for a beginner?

http://www.grizzly.com/products/Mill-Drill/G0463

This price is pretty much as much as I'd want to spend. I looked at some of the smaller mills, and they seemed to lack things I might want such as an R8 spindle, reversing switch, and 7/16"-20 TPI draw bar.

I'll be using this in the basement of my house, so for that reason, and the fact i don't have $3000 to drop on a mill are reason I'm pretty much excluding the knee mills for now.
 
i would start off with a larger model myself. you can spend around 1600 and get a very decent 'starter' mill. my issues with the mill selected by you are 2 fold. #1 it has a smaller table that doesn't travel that much. #2 it doesn't seem as beefy or powerful as you would like. I bought this mill about 6 years ago
http://www.busybeetools.com/products/MILLING-DRILLING-M{47}C-1-1{47}2-HP-220V.html

at the time i thought it was the biggest heaviest thing i could want. and it sereved(s) me very well, but it was not long before i wanted a mill with more travel, more weight and a bigger table. these things matter a lot unless you want to continuously re-locate and align your work, and take shallow passes while hogging material. I would honestly buy as big as you can, the first time. Pick the tooling you want, wether its R8 or other than buy as big as you can. Milling machines that have been used can be had for a lot cheaper than new. Its a bit of a hunt but you can get smoking deals on machines that you will really appreciate.
 
I have one of each of the illustrated machines. The small one simmilar to the grizzly is in the basement and the larger mill-drill is in the shop. As Jason says the small machine is very limited in volume of work it can do, excellent for small wood , brass or aluminum jobs and very small steel work. Accuracy can be very good with proper tooling, set-up and measuring. Light cuts will be the order no matter what material you are working on.

The larger machine is more robust and easily takes steel off at a reasonal speed for a cheaper machine. Again accuracy is adequate with propper set-up. Will do small jobs equally as well as the larger ones. The main draw back will be to get it into your basement but it can be done by breaking it down into managable pieces. Some of the pieces will require more than one person.

While the bigger machine isn't a Bridgeport if I could only have one machine I would by far want the big one.
 
Whatever you spend on the mill itself, figure on spending (at least eventually) 3 to 10 times that amount on accessories and tooling. I now buy small mills in dozen lots as I know I will break or dull them in short order, even with flood coolant.
Dr Jim
 
Starting out the main purposes will be stuff like inletting homemade stocks, perhaps trying some stuff with aluminum like making my own trigger guard etc.
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These things are MUCH more difficult than you would imagine. It is extremely hard to cut non-linear shapes on manual equipment.

Operating a mill or lathe inside your home is not a great idea. The smell of burning cutting oil will fill the house and likely annoy your wife a fair bit. Best bit of advice I ever took was to install the machinery in the garage.
 
Buy a mill drill with a #3 morris taper not an R-8. I think you can get a fairly big one at house of tools or places like that for $1400 or so. You want as much travel as you can get on your table.
 
Well as it stands right now, it's either the basement or outside :) I have full size windows in my basement and the room has it's own door, so hopefully I could vent it well enough when needed. I realize stock inletting, as well as other projects might not be easy, but I can't very well not do it just because it might present some difficulties :)
 
I started out with a small mill like the grizzly with the same idea as you but found it was not adequate to do large steel work. It can only do small cuts. I sold that and bought the Buzybee B1977 from my friend. He had it in his basement. We took it apart in 4 pieces and moved it up from his basement.

Don't waste your money on the grizzly mill like I did.
 
I looked at milling and costed out tooling before I bought one, I have a good sized lathe, so I had an idea about what tooling I would require. I soon realized that the mill uses much more expensive tools than the lathe for the most part. I live close enough to Grizzly tools that I went to pick up a model G3617, which has worked very well for me. It is a small horizontal/vertical mill. Belt driven. The vise it comes with is crap, but the table is 39 inches long with 22 inches of travel. Not long enough to flute a rifle barre in one go, but it is nice to have the room for other jobs. It is about 3300 bucks, and with the horizontal feature it nearly doubles the usefullness of any tool you buy or make, When I got to the border I had $2500 in milling tools to go with the mill, and I am not what any pro would call well equipped. The $1500 more that my mill was than a good bench top machine will soon be forgotten, (especially if we were able to take it out of the shoes and hairdo's fund), and considering the cost of tooling, it is not a lot of money.
 
billdick said:
Buy a mill drill with a #3 morris taper not an R-8. I think you can get a fairly big one at house of tools or places like that for $1400 or so. You want as much travel as you can get on your table.
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Uhh... "Morse" taper. It was the fella's name. ;)

I'd normally recommend against the Morse taper mills in favour of an R-8 taper, but there are pretty good points for both.

I'll start by saying that, by the time you become confident and reasonably proficient with any benchtop machine tool, you will have a well developed sense of humour, a great deal more patience than you started with, and a deep appreciation for sharp tools!

The work cube of the benchtop machines is small. It does a body good to make up some cardboard boxes that are the size of the work envelope of the machines being considered. Makes an easier comparison, when all you have is a specs sheet to go by. Consider how much of this room is needed for work holding and tool holding, when you consider the siize of machine that will work for you, too.

Consider the cost of tooling. Expect to have at least the amount you spent on the machine, in accessories and cutters, by the time you get rolling. Not right away, but each time you get stuck because you don't have a _____ , you start to see how it gets a bit loopy.
A decent vise (got enough vices, thanks!), a boring head, tool holders, a rotary table, an indexer, etc., etc.
Then you need the actual cutting tools themselves. Cheap ones are OK for some things, good ones break just as easy as cheap ones. A couple decent carbide end mills, once you have the confidence to use them...

IIRC, the Grizz mill is the one known generically as an X-2 or X-3 mill. Lots of good stuff being made on them.

The Busy Bee one is what is known as an RF-30 mill-drill. Same. Lots of good work on them too.

Don't sell short the idea of drawing your parts out and cutting to a line by eyeball! It isn't glamorous, but it beats heck out of files and a chisel for moving metal. Learning how to run a good set of files is a great skill to develop too, BTW. Complimentary skillset to using a mill. Just another cutting tool for metal, eh.

Allright. Morse taper vs. R-8

MT Pro's :
-low cost tooling available
-large drills fit direct into the machine taper
-interchange tools with the lathe (yep, you'll want a lathe too)

Cons:
-Pretty much only low cost tools available (quality levels vary)
-self locking taper. Sometimes requires a solid whack to release. Tough on spindle bearings.

-limited selection of types of tool holders available.

R-8 taper has been in use for 80 years or so, and is(was) the standard tool type for a Bridgeport mill.

I cannot think of any Cons off the top of my head. OK, one. You have a tough time using a large Morse Taper drill in an R-8 mill, due to the length of the adaptor required.

Pros:

-available in huge variety, almost everywhere. From cheapest to best quality.
-There is a lot of good, used tooling available. It is resellable, trade-able, upgradeable, to a much wider field of view than Morse taper mill tooling is.

-taper releases far easier. Not near the beatings required to get the tool out of the machine.

-Quick change tooling. Tormach Tool System. Neat system uses a modified Collet to hold tool holders. Worth a look.
-collets will hold tools. Allows maximum use of the headspace available
-Did I say huge variety? I'll say it again! Huge!

All that said, I really like the RF-30 style mill drills, round column and all. If gotten in a Morse taper, they make a great heavy duty drill press, something that is tough to find for less than the price of a new car these days. If you get the R-8 version, drilling is pretty much limited to drills that will fit into a chuck or which have a shank that will fit in a collet or tool holder. In a perfect word, the RF-30 would be bolted down to a bench that would allow the head to be swing around to use it as a drill press on one side and the mill table could be left with a vise on it, or whatever. Just a lot more general applications for one.

The X-2/X-3 mills can be hacked into a pretty reasonable CNC machine, and the collective knowledge base is huge, too. Having a small work envelope is only limiting if you decide it has to be.

Doesn't matter what you get though, the rule of thumb is that the machine you do get, you will find it too small. Happens!:D

Read, learn, try things (that you thought out a bit first, hopefully) break a few tools, make a few chips, and have fun!

Got Home Shop Machinist magazine yet? You should. Lots of good articles, lots of ads from dealers that don't mind dealing with the hobby guys. They (Village Press, the publishers) also sell hardcover books of the collected works of different authors that they have published over the years. Lots of plans for DIY tools and tooling, if you are willing to go that way. Great way to get an education, while building the capability in your shop.

Oh yeah. A plug for the South Sask guys that may be interested in checking out some hobby machining stuff. The Estevan Model Engineering Show is coming up. A bunch of great guys with their hobby on display. Subject matter ranges from steam engines, all through the metalwork realm. Casting demos(usually), last year had a home made jet engine, a couple years back, an Engraver by the name of R Ronnie had a bunch of his stuff to show. Interested? Bang EMES into a search engine along with Estevan, and you should get all the info you need.

Cheers
Trev
 
Take a look at this guys web site: https://www.machinetoolswarehouse.com/xcart/catalog/MTW-orderby_0-p-1-c-309.html

The RF-45 clone is a great machine, my local collage (SAIT) has just got a number of these in (to teach apprentices). The main advantage of this machine over the RF-30 is that it (RF-45) has a square column. With a round column machine, like the RF-30, as you move the head up or down it also rotates, i.e. if you drill a pilot hole and then move the head up to drill a big hole, the axis of the large drill is unlikely to be inline with the pilot hole. Round column machine are also not as rigid as square column machines.
The RC-45 is a big machine, but I know of people who have got them into a basement (through a big window) using a wooden ramp and a winch.
 
Yep. Loss of index on the round column mills can be an issue. Mostly, I tell guys to get over it, and use it as an opportunity to become very quick with picking up or dialling-in on a spot, hole, or other feature.
Not as big an issue as it gets made out to be in the last 15 or more years of online arguments about the issue, really. I have used one a fair bit, and it was never as much of a problem as it sounds like it should be.
In simple enough terms, if you need the repeatable precision that is implied there, you are going to use skills and technique to compensate. Measure twice, cut once, kind of stuff.

Finding a round column mill with a tall column on it (makes a lot of extra room under the spindle for use of long tools) is a bonus too. I know one outfit that sold a lot of them as drill presses, and would only sell the 'tall' version.


The biggest reason in favor of the round column mills is quiet, IMO. They don't sound like a cement truck full of rocks when they run. Some of the gear drive mills that I have used, did. Individual results may vary, of course, but it'd be worth listening to them run if you can.

To the other side, the gear drive units are a lot easier to CNC with reasonable Z axis travel. The round column mills are limited to the 5 or so inches that the quill moves, while the entire head moves up and down for the dovetail machines.

The round column machines tend to have a higher top rpm as well as a higher lowest rpm. Gonna depend on what you want to run for cutters, large or small stuff.
There are ways around the issue on both.


Cheers
Trev
 
I got the sieg sx3. it's large enough to do stuff with some creative fixturing, but i kick myself every time i use it, because if i kept an eye out for a few months i'm sure i could have found a fullsized knee mill used for the price.
 
I have an RF-45 and it is a great starter mill I got it at pyramid tools in calgary it was aroun $3500 it is made in taiwan there are also the clones that are made in china for 1/2 the price but I wouldn't advise on that one.
I know a guy who bought the chinese one and it doesn't compare accuracy wise the head on it wasn't square with the base and he had problems with the motor and the gear head.
 
If you are only cutting wood and aluminum you need speed, if you want to cut brass,steel,stainless steel etc you need power and rigidity (weight). For wood and aluminum get a machine with high spindle speeds for the other metals you need a good range of lower speeds.
Here is a link that you might find interesting:http://www.smithy.com/
For cutting curves and contours practice with an etch a sketch.......
 
Thanks for all the comments guys, they've been really helpful. I've run into a different issue now. I've found a metal lathe for sale. Has a 15" swing, and 4 foot length center to center. It's an older one and was converted from line drive, to it's own motor. Has many speeds and carbide and steel holders, 3 and 4 jaw chucks, some tools. The owner is getting back to me with pictures and the brand name ( couldn't remember right off ). I know I'd want both a mill and a lathe eventually, do you guys think this would be a good item?
 
hard to say without seeing condition. If the ways are solid, all gears are in good condition, and it works, it might be a good deal. There are home machine shop forums out there that will be able to help you as well. (note that most aren't quite as busy as here)

To give you an idea of capabilities of the x3 sized machine, I've been able to run a fly cutter with carbide insert at a depth of around 12 thou through 4140 no problem. I've had really good luck with a 2 insert facemill I use in mild steels as well.

edit- you may wanna check to see if the lathe comes with a faceplate. They may seem less than useful at first, but I use the lathe for pretty much any boring I need to do in odd shaped parts, because it's a hell of a lot easier than using a boring bar in a mill.
 
SouthPaw700 said:
Thanks for all the comments guys, they've been really helpful. I've run into a different issue now. I've found a metal lathe for sale. Has a 15" swing, and 4 foot length center to center. It's an older one and was converted from line drive, to it's own motor. Has many speeds and carbide and steel holders, 3 and 4 jaw chucks, some tools. The owner is getting back to me with pictures and the brand name ( couldn't remember right off ). I know I'd want both a mill and a lathe eventually, do you guys think this would be a good item?
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If it was originally driven with belting from an overhead shaft, and was later motorized, it is a REALLY old lathe. Not that there is anything wrong with being old, but condition is important. The machine could have been in use for close to a century.
 
Well fellas, here's what I am thinking based on the discussions so far. Given a 1000-1600 budget it looks like it's between these two:


http://www.grizzly.com/products/2-HP-Mill-Drill/G1006

http://www.busybeetools.com/products/MILLING-DRILLING-M%7B47%7DC-1-1%7B47%7D2-HP-220V.html

Pretty similar I think, but some small differences. For example the Grizzly has a top RPM of 3000, compared to 2500. Will that make a difference if I want to be able to do wood and alum. as well as steel?

Initially the price difference seems substantial, but after the grizzly is shipped from the US I don't think it will be too different. I can drive to Dartmouth NS and pick the busy bee one up myself. The used market here on PEI doesn't seem to be too plentiful :)
 
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