Great Cnc Mill Online Reviews

I ordered this item from an Ebay auction. It came packaged into a small USPS box, carefully and neatly. All the parts were there with extras as well.

It took me about three hours to assemble it. Make sure you have a good vise with at least a 3″ jaw to help you set the bearings and bushings. Keep an eye on the orientation of the parts as well so you only have to build it once The online build guide is well thoughtout and easy to follow. And the online community is active and ready to help.

My goal was first to build a model CNC mill. To start from the beginning and learn as much as possible. This kit certainly did that for me. Once finished, and under computer control, I stuck a small pen into the spindle and did some lettering with serifs. Even under high magnification the curves and tips were perfect. Very accurate and capable unit!

Ive been cutting foam now for casting molds and just happy as can be. The performance is good, the accuracy is high, and its just plain fun to watch it run. Plus the kit aspect makes it even more fun

Thanks again for the coolio and fun project! The price is outstanding for the educational value of this kit, and when your finished, you get an outstanding tool for your workshop too boot!

Pictures of my unit [...].

If the product worked smoothly and set up easily and integrated with the other required components that are not provided, pre purchase documentation would be readily available from the manufacturer.

There are about 3 or 4 other companies that sell a version of this mill. Grizzly has the best motor and table that I have seen. Micro-Mark has a different scale on the feeds, but if you go with a digital readout, it doesn’t make a difference. Plain and simple, this is the one to go with.

As noted by a previous reviewer, this same model (all made by Sieg in China) are available from a variety of sources. I purchased mine from Grizzly, largely because of the support that Grizzly provides. If I were to purchase this same milling machine again, I would probably go with Micro-Mark which is about the same price. The big difference is that the Grizzly version uses 0.060″/turn on the x and y axis and 0.0625″/turn on the Z-axis, while the Micro-Mark uses 0.050″/turn on all axis. It’s a lot easier to dial in, say a 0.384 movement at 0.050″/turn than it is to divide 0.0625 into 0.384 to determine the number of full turns and the add’l thousands needed to hit 0.384 exactly.

Anyone considering a small milling machine probably knows that you’ll spend nearly as much on tooling as the initial purchase price of the mill. With this mill, plan on additional purchases of a belt drive kit ($120)to replace the noisey, failure prone gear train and an air spring kit ($40)to replace the cheesey torsion spring mechanism. Without the air spring kit, the mill head will occasionally drop 50 thou or so, resulting in an undesired gouge in your work piece. Both kits are available from LittleMachineShop.com (an Amazon supplier).

Provided that you don’t push it too hard, this little guy will handle machining of small steel, brass, aluminum, delrin, etc. work pieces with accuracy of +/- a few thou. To do that, however, plan on investing a considerable amount of time on tuning the machine by polishing and adjusting the gibbs and tweaking the nuts on the lead screws to minimize backlash. Besides improving the performance of the machine, this tuning will improve your understanding of how all the pieces fit together to perform the milling function.