Like the title says, any mini milling users in here? I'm looking into the benchtop milling machines. So far I've checked out the Sherline stuff. Any other good quality mini milling machines out there I should look into?

Any help is appreciated.

Mike

 

Go out and get a used brideportmill. May not be table top, but worth the money.

 

Thanks. Trust me, if I had the space I'd much rather have a Bridgeport. But I don't really have the space for a milling machine that large, and most of the stuff I'll be machining is smaller anyway. The newer benchtop mills/lathes from Sherline are CNC ready.

What about some of those mills at Harbor Freight. Anybody deal with those at all? They have some mid-size mills but I don't know if I trust the quality of them and wonder how difficult it would be to find parts for them in the future.?

Mike

 

Is it just space that is your concern? Honestly, I payed less for my mill and my lathe than a lot of those little benchtop jobs go for. They are both well used, but worth every penny spent. If you are just wanting to do little stuff like small brackets, emblems, etc., then I would say go for it, but I like knowing I can put whatever I want on the table of my mill and whittle away. (Brown and Sharpe model 2, old and HUGE)

 

A buddy of mine uses the combo Mill/Lathe from harbor freight. For the small jobs it works great on spacers and small brackets. Anything over 3" od and larger than 4 by 4 the quality and run out goes to crap. Another thing to ponder is what type of electrical utilities do you have available?

 

I find myself kicking around the idea of a mill as well (since I have some money laying around from selling my car ). I could probably make room for a Bridgeport, but I look at the size of those behemoths and think to myself "how the hell do I get it here safely? how do I move it?" etc. Yeah, I've seen pages about guys moving them 30 feet an hour on steel tubes etc... yikes. Moving those beasties sounds like a real chore. I don't have a lot of help around here either.

Though I could have used one tonight to make a few small brackets. Had to make them the old fashioned way... band saw, grinder, welder...

My other concern is tooling. From what I've "heard", you need to take the price of your mill and double it for tooling.

Chinese mills have a very poor reputation, and you get no love at all on any of the machinist forums if you have one. You're basically on your own. Find an American, or at least an upscale import, and you will fare better at Q&A. Sites like practicalmachinist.com seem like they will just about run you out of town if you post questions about HF or Smithy mills.

 

http://www.mdaprecision.com/Products...0products.html

Not cheap but very nice setups. Yes I have one

Tooling is not that bad unless you are hardcore as with CNC a few bits do alot.

Now the CNC software will run another 500-1000 also :o

Fred

 

I might be buying one this weekend, found a 20+ year old benchtop locally pretty cheap. 18.5" x 6.25" table, 1.5hp motor. Taiwanese (which are a notch above Chinese). If I end up getting it, I'll go through it first. Scrape the ways and all that.

Looks like I'm going to get it. $275 for the mill with an assortment of new and used collets, end mills, face mill, drill chuck, V blocks, vice, etc. Going to get it on Sunday. It's a Central Machinery 981, which is very similar to a Jet-16. Not much info out there on them. I don't expect much out of it, but I'm not going to be building precise parts with it. Primarily messing around and repairing some stuff. Since it's an R8 spindle, it'll make the move to a Bridgeport easier, right?

 

OK, so I picked it up today. Pictures are attached.

The mill is dirty, has a couple cuts in the bed, but overall, it's tight and seems to work smoothly. I gave $150 for the mill, I think it'll clean up OK and be usable for non-tolerance stuff.

I gave $170 for the rest of his stuff. An assortment of mill bits, boring bit, endmill, R8 collets, and a set of quick-change collets. I've got collets that cover 3/16-3/4 by 1/16 increments, and then a 1" collet. These were new in box. And a couple of indicators thrown in as well. And a couple new in box V-blocks, and a keyless drill chuck.

Total of $320 for everything. Good enough for what I want to do short term.

(the $275 was without all the R8 collets, I asked what he wanted for them and the indicators, he said $45).

 

Looks like the ones they are still selling. Yup Taiwan is better than the Chinese stuff, where an older Jet lathe I had came from. 20 incher, outgrew it in about 2 weeks

I picked up this Mill/Lathe combo last year. Had 5 boxes of tooling and about every attachment you have ever seen. Just a 24 incher, but has a 1.75 spindle bore

Good luck on the cleanup.

 

That's a nice lathe. How much did you give for it? That's about the same size I'm looking for. Looks like it can do just about everything you'd want!

And that's a nice box of tooling too!

 

It is around 20 years old but in great shape. I gave $3000 for it. New ones are around 11k without even a chuck and no milling head

If you look for one, stay away from the Mentor units. They have a push button speed control which tends to be troublesome.

 

Nice score on that machine, and especially the tooling. I thought I had a line on a similiar machine, but it was brand new, unused. Just called on it and it was sold already. Yours is a Central Machinery unit? Are the newer versions still made in the same place as the older units?

Mike

 

I'm pretty sure that the new Central Machinery units are made in the Seig factory in China (same as Jet, Grizzly, Northern Tool, etc). http://www.siegind.com The Central Machinery 981 Complex Machine (the "name" of the machine I got, mine's from 1984) was made in Taiwan (different factory). This unit has the exact same works as a Jet-16 Drilling & Milling Machine. I found the user manual to the Jet machine online after seeing a guy post a bunch of pics of his machine. Just a different table size (Jet is slightly larger)... the head is identical.

I dug in to my machine today. Cleaned the (somewhat rusty) swarf off of it, and cleaned the moving surfaces well and then oiled them. Machine moves a WHOLE lot better now. The table is a little rougher than I thought, and there's some slop in the crank when you change directions left-right. But since I'll pretty much be doing the Etch-a-Sketch version of milling anyway, it's probably OK to start with.

I've got a couple of things I need to do, there is a rubber swarf skirt that degraded that needs replacing (keeps chips out of the fore-aft screw valley). Also there were a couple of gasket-like stops for the rack gear sleeve that crumbled away as I moved the head up and down, so I need to get or make some new stops for the rack gear sleeve.

I've seen a couple of Jet-16 units on Craigslist. Here's one in WA:

http://bellingham.craigslist.org/tls/774198392.html

But others have had a lower price than that. I wouldn't pay $800 for this machine unless it was PERFECT (perfect table, perfect gaskets, perfect sliding parts) and included all the tooling.


Oh, and about the lathe, that really is a beauty. $3k is a little higher than I want to spend right away, but who knows, some day I probably will. But, for a good quality lathe, it seems like you really do have to go to the $3k-$4k+ range to get a heavy unit to provide repeatable results.

 

Camaroholic, You can move a bridgeport pretty easy with a cherrypicker/engine hoist. You can also seperate the head from the base.

 

Yep, I've thought about that, and that's how I moved this one (it barely fit inside my Suburban, but it did).

Never seen a BP for sale locally though. Closest one I've seen is Austin (hour drive). Saw one a while back, they were asking $750, but it was missing some parts and had "some wear". I offered $450 on it but never heard back. Having a BP would be great, but I'll learn on this. Who knows, maybe I'll just step it up to CNC in the future should I decide to go further. I can see how x-y-z milling manually can be a bit... painful.

 

i use this

http://www.americanmachinetools.com/...op_milling.htm

 

Good information to know, thanks. I'll probably call about that Jet-16 and see if it's still available, condition etc. It does come with some tooling according to the ad so who knows. This is the one I was calling about the other day. It was a combo milling/drilling/lathe from Harbor Freight and was brand new but at 500.00, it was 200.00 less than new price. http://portland.craigslist.org/clc/tls/791342442.html

You could always machine your own slide(way)/skirts out of teflon. Would make a great first project LOL.... Once I get a machine, I'm going to practice on some plastic or other soft composite material to get used to it. Cheaper and easier to work with.

Mike

 

Yep, my wife looked at me funny when I told her yesterday "when you're out shopping this week, if you run across any hunks of solid plastic... I don't care if it's a toy, if it's a decorator item, or what... if it's cheap and on sale, buy it for me." I'm going to do the same thing. A solid hunk of PVC would be just about ideal, I think.

 

Check Ebay for plastic chunks and other metal. Really cheap but watch shipping.

FB