OT 6 in 1 tool

looks like cheap plastic junk to be honest, look at something like this:

it is twice as expensive and a bit, but look at the weight 138 lbs vs.

11 lbs

-Lasse

h...

Yes, the 6 in 1 is aluminum. The shipping (and carrying up three flights of stairs) on 138lbs would be interesting. I'm really thinking more along the lines of something that can fit on a desk next to a multimeter.

Seeing things like this

142.html

makes me realize even more what a ripoff the Makerbot is... I do not understand the geek infatuation with that thing.

When you can get 654 POUNDS of metal for 1500$ and the Makerbot, a ramshackle affair that weighs 5 pounds is 1300$, there's something wrong.

That's fine.

Small is fine.

Yes, the price is just at that annoying zone between "buy it now" and "think about it"...

Looks like it's made with LEGO's ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Move up to a real one, it does not have to be large, just one made of cast iron to start with.

Jamie

These everything in one tools tend to be relatively poor at all of them. We got a much bigger lathe/mill/drill at work a long time ago. It actually isn't horrible as a lathe, but is pretty bad as a mill/drill, mostly because there's no way to raise-lower the head, and the quill only has a couple inches of travel. Some other machines don't have this limitation.

Is this thing made largely out of plastic? I'd be concerned that it had poor rigidity if so.

Jon

^^^^^^^

Don't you want it to last more than a week?

I think a semi-serious $500 range Taiwanese milling machine, with a drill chuck and serious R8 collets, is a more sensible buy. It can do serious stuff, and most people don't need a lathe that much.

John

You assume I know what you mean, and where to look for one.

Start with the right newsgroup: news:rec.crafts.metalworking which I added to the headers.

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

Get this instead, it will do what you want way better than the pretend transformers thing.

Do any of the ~$500 machines have an R8 spindle?... anyway-

One doesn't need an R8 spindle on machines so small.

The above machine comes with a MT3 drill chuck, and 3/8" and 1/2" collets. The 1/2" can take cheap fly cutters, the 3/8" will handle regular mills 3/8" down to 3/16", and for the tiny 1/8"-shank mill bits, one can just use the drill chuck.

You can turn small+short parts in the drill chuck (kinda like a lathe). Longer parts would require a real actual lathe. If possible, get a lathe that can do some English & metric threading and that has power feed.

The MAIN thing about this mill is that the speed is constantly-variable. When milling by hand, you will tend to run it at lower speeds way more often than high speeds.

Also: budget maybe $300 for immediate accessories. The vise I'd recommend is $110, for example-

Assuming you are in the USA, Littlemachineshop has a lot of parts & accessories particular to these tiny metalworking machines. Many accessories for the larger equipment is not useful on the little machines at all.

Something like this:

I think there are cheaper ones around. Google for or and .

John

Round-column mill = poor choice, according to most people. The Micromark below is a square column, as is the Grizzly I mentioned in the other post....

Yea but seeeeee,,,,,,,,, here's the thing.

The main advantage a R8 spindle has over a MT3 is the R8 is stronger & can take bigger tools: up to 7/8" diameter shanks. But with these tiny mills, you wouldn't be able to run anything much bigger than maybe 3/8" anyway. The mill don't got the stiffness or the power.

The Micromark is basically the same machine as the Grizzly, but with an R8 spindle, and costing $120 more. And the Grizzly comes with the 3/8" and 1/2" collets that the Micromark doesn't include, which would cost you roughly $10 each,,,, so the Micromark is really $140 more. For no useful reason.

The 3/8" and 1/2" collets is all you'd ever need for a small machine, since end mills 3/8" down to 1/8" are available with 3/8" shanks, and fly cutters have 1/2" shanks.

You can get MT3 collets up to 3/4" diameter if you wanted them (for cutting /plastic/ that is...). If you wanted to make bigger cuts than

1/2" radius, it may be more cost-effective to just get a boring head however, since it can adjust to cut different diameters. A 3/4" MT3 collet + 3/4" HSS stub end mill from Enco would cost you ~$40, where a MT3 boring head from littlemachineshop or grizzly will cost ~$70.

If you already had a BIG mill with R8 tooling, then maybe getting a tiny machine with an R8 spindle would make more sense.

And it might be that there is some other reason to get the Micromark over the Grizzly--difference in shipping costs related to where you live, perhaps.

If all you will have in the foreseeable future is the tiny mill, don't pay extra for an R8 spindle--or worry about it not having one. It's not going to matter.

It's tiny and plastic- looks like it weighs less than 10lb (which is really bad in machine tools where rigidity is everything).

220V only? Seriously, that looks like a waste of almost $300 on a toy.

I picked up (not literally) a Grizzly G06019 and like it (R8 spindle). It can use most of the cheap Bridgeport tooling that's available (stuff that's too long can be a problem since there isn't all that knee travel to work with). Not trivial to get up/down stairs, but easy enough to move around with an engine hoist.

If you don't have hard currency, the price of these things is gradually creeping up as the US dollar declines (I think I paid about 20% less than the current price), but they're still pretty reasonable at $3.60/lb. There's a giant sucking sound as the really low end jobs are relocated by Chinese companies into cheaper nearby countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia, so hopefully prices will continue to decline in real terms.

--sp

If it's massive enough, it won't matter. Bridgeports are round.

John

The issue is not the stiffness.

A Bridgeport is a knee mill; the Z axis is not adjusted by loosening the head on the round column. With that style mill, the entire table moves up-and-down on its own set of dovetails--so you can adjust the head-to-table distance freely without ever loosening the clamp that holds the head secured to the round column it's on.

You can rotate the head around on the column if you need to--but you can also change the table height, and the head will stay fixed over the same exact point on the table below.

With the small bench-top round-column mills, the clamp that you must loosen to move the head up and down is also usually the same clamp that keeps the head from turning left-and-right on the column. This is not good.

When you are working on a part and want to raise or lower the head (and you WILL be doing this) the head also tends to drift left or right around the column, and then you need to stop working and use various techniques and gauges to re-center it over the point it was previously over. Even moving just .001" can ruin many parts.

The feature of being able to rotate the head around the column is very rarely useful in practice (especially since the swing distance is not adjustable, like a radial drill). The problem of the head losing X-Y positioning is a hassle every time you change the head height while you are working though, and you will do that a LOT.

You might suppose you can just set the head high, and then extend the quill downward as much as you need to mill a part. It will work, but the quill is not nearly as stiff when extended as it is when retracted,,,, so you this way you will end up using much smaller end mills and cutting much slower than usual. Plus if the bit chatters anyway,,,, smaller end mills are much more likely to break than larger ones.

The CNC kits also don't work with the round-column mills (if that is any concern).

If you can get a small round-column mill for a REALLY low price, go ahead and do it. There is a trick using a firearm laser pointer that greatly speeds up re-centering the head of a round-column mill. You get a cheap gun-mount laser (like $25 at wal-mart) and then mount it FIXED on the head of the mill, pointing horizontally. Raise the head up all the way and turn the laser on, and then on the opposite wall where the laser spot is hitting, you stick a piece of string on a thumbtack with a weight on the end. ........ After doing all this, anytime you adjust the head up and down you can just turn the laser on for a moment, and smack the head left-right until the laser spot hits the string on the opposite wall, and then re-tighten the head clamp--and you know that the head is pointed the same it was before you changed the height.

If you gotta pay full price though, do yourself a favor and just get a square-column mill. You'll be much happier with it.

I bought this mill for $20. :)

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