Hmmmm….Ryobi with a Lithium battery......I'll do some searching for that goody.....the NMH one is an 18volt type

On the topic of the mill, I baulked at the prospect of going to a manual mill retrofit when I took the bait and wanted to get into CNC.

I'm an oldie from the 50's and manual stuff is/was all I know.....I wanted to get into CNC for the challenge so I decided after a long forum posting on the Skyfire thread to get the SVM-0 production model after the prototype was established (UTUBE) and with the various options that I was lucky to get.

A couple of options became available after twisting Defeng Ren's arm and I got a mill with a lot more than just the basic model.....long story if you like to be bored.

One thing that tipped the balance in my favour and that was the spindle mod to an ISO20 taper for interchangeable tooling and a power drawbar.....the complete enclosure was also the cream on the top so to say.

It came ready to run straight out of the box although I had trouble initially when I tried to run it with a 64 bit computer instead of a 32 bit one but the guys at Skyfire .com bent over backwards to get it up and running.....can't say enough about the experience when I wrote my first bits of G code and got it running.

I would think that the end justifies the means and overkill is just an expensive way of getting to where you want to go.

If a ROI is not an issue then having a new state of the art machine that you know is great makes working with it so much more fun......I love good tools and the cost sometimes is not a deciding factor...….having been in close contact for 60 years or so with industrial machinery does make you expect anything that moves to be just as good.
Ian.