New Milling Machine
I recently had the chance to buy this slightly used milling machine. It is a model that I didn’t know about previously but which has a lot of attractive features. It is a knee mill (which means that the table raises and lowers) and at 800lbs is a lot sturdier than the tiny mill/drill that I was using. It should be rigid enough for me to miter bicycle tubing and I won’t be running into the limitations of this mill as quickly as I did with my mini-mill.
The seller was nice enough to help me take the machine apart and move it to my house. When we left his house it was on his truck and looked like this:
That is just the body of the mill standing on his truck. The rest is laid on the floor. We broke it down into pieces to make the weight more manageable. It was still a heavy beast to move. The manual crane on his truck was also a huge help. We still had to lift it down the stairs ourselves, but the crane helped a lot when we needed to get it on and off of the truck.
After a few hours work we had it at my house and major pieces were laid out on the floor. The next weekend I rented an engine hoist and Alistair came over and helped me put it back together. Here is the body, head, and knee (600lbs total?) getting placed back onto the stand. I don’t think we could have done this without the engine hoist.
I mounted the mill onto wheels so that I could more easily position it in my workshop. It ended up on the wall next to my lathe. I like the idea of having all of the metal machining in one corner of the shop. The sizes of the two machines complement each other nicely too.
