Good afternoon to all! Thank you for the nice comments. The mill has been a steep learning curve with a lot of mistakes before I got this far. There is a lot of planning that goes into making this thing function and I have a lot of new found respect for those of you who make a living working with the full sized machines.
I have learned, or I should say relearned the lesson about measure twice(or three or five) times and cut once. This is a very small machine so taking a lot of little cuts is important. The cuts to cut the channels between the supports were ten passes taking .005" at a time. It is far easier to go deeper then to undo a cut that it too deep. Little cuts are better than big cuts especially with very small mill ends because they flex easily and distort the cut. Everything needs to be locked down except the direction you are cutting.
I have been using a lot of Zen with this machine. Thinking about the problems and how to do it every morning during my hour long walks. Mentally visualizing the steps is important is making it all work. I suppose that is not that different from how I build with plastic it just seems to be a bit more complex. Still it is fun.
Ray and KC- owning both a mill and lathe has been a long time in coming. I have had the lathe for over five years and just got to the point that there was stuff I wanted to do that a lathe would not do. As a incorrigible tinker and do it yourselfer, I have found a lot of other uses for the lathe besides model building. I have made and repaired a lot of things that I never would have considered without it. I am sure the mill will prove equally useful. At least that is what I told my wife. ![]()












