Hey guys,

Before getting started I want to thank the owners of this forum for offering such a wealth of collective information for free. I also want to thank Leeway and Arie for their great and very detailed build threads that inspired me and helped to provide ideas.

A little background: I have a small business designing and making putters from brass and aluminum. My existing mills were both Sherlines: one CNC and one manual. Although quality mills they certainly lack in rigidity, speed and power. I was very limited in the machining approaches I could use and to a certain extent the designs possible. Plus, total cycle times were obviously a bit long.

I wanted a new CNC mill. The garage is detached, not heated or insulated and has one breaker. The basement is finished and is full of stuff. This had to be put where the existing mills were, in a bedroom. Options were very limited for a machine that would be "practical" in a bedroom, pretty much 300 pounds or less. To me, the X2 and X3 based machines had no appeal for both quality and other reasons. The Minitech that I liked was the 3 pro (With linear ways and ballscrews), but this thing was $14,000+ and looked a little light duty. It would remove material faster than the Sherline but not to the degree that would justify that amount of money. That left Wabeco, the most likely candidate. At the time it was $10,500 (Now about 9K). I would also want an ISO30 taper ($600 option) as MT2 tooling doesn't really appeal to me. The ISO30 tooling along with having a mill shipped to Canada from California would cost me a fortune.

That left me with building a mill. After viewing threads on here (Lee Way, Arie, etc...) I decided on a general size and configuration. Vertical, about 11" of X, 6-7" of Y and 10" of Z, fully supported table (long saddle, short table).

The main frame components were a real problem. I didn't have much to work with, manual and CNC Sherlines. The day job is in a machine shop but time there is for them and not my projects, especially not something home business related. A bench top drill press (10" Canadian Tire one) was picked up to help me out. The only viable option seemed to be aluminum extrusion (8020 or the like) heavily cross braced and reinforced. Leeway had built quite a mill with the stuff, but he used huge linear rails for the size of the machine (25's and 35's) to strengthen it up. I started to design a mill around 8020 and then came across two 6" by 5" by 24" blocks of solid aluminum at a local scrap place. I went back, purchased one, checked it over and then bought the second. They were 70 pounds each, total cost $300.

Ground ballscrews and linear rails were purchased on ebay. The rails: 20mm for X and Y and 15mm heavy pre-load for Z, all THK. The ballscrews: NSK 20mm, 5mm pitch for Y, NSK 14mm, 5mm pitch for X, Kuroda 15mm, 4mm pitch for Z. A mill was designed around this an X2 spindle and the aluminum blocks.