Cnc Mill Interesting Hint

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.

If you are new to the DIY CNC machine and interested, but don’t know where to start – this is a great book for you. It will help you understand some of the vocabulary and gives a good introduction to each major area you will have to consider when building your own machine. The intent of this book is to provide an overview and is not the book for you if you want an in depth set of plans or schematics.