[wizard]

I would not even consider that mill. If you actually want ot make money off the machine it would be best to go with something more substantial. Others have already pointed out some of the needs for a machine to produce parts with little post machining work.

Frankly at the low end you only have two choices in my mind. One is to pick up a bargain real CNC mill at a resanable price (it can be done) or to go the doit yourself route with an import retro fit. Either way you are very likely to spend more than what this mill costs, but should get much better results.

Dave

[M4RK_23]

Ok well I'm on a small budget $3000 is about max I can see spending for the machine alone. Software I already have auto cad and master cam copys from when I was in school. Can you guys give me some other machines to look at. I know going as big as you can is best but at this time this is as big as I will need. I'm only interested in making small things like dealer buttons as I said before. Making something like that out of acrylic I would want to run it on the machine to make the engraved picture then sandblast the engraved surface and be done. When I talk about what kind of resolution I'm looking for lets say I cut a 2" dia semi sphere out of aluminum. I would want a machine that can cut that shape without the need for any finish work other than buffing with a cotton wheel or fine grit sandblasting. Resolution is more important to me than accuracy if it can cut smooth but be off by a couple hundreths it won't really matter as I'm not making working parts but I suppose thoese two things come hand in hand. So how bout it show me some machines that I could use. If there is no machines that can do this within my budget show me ones that can that are over budget. Thanks -Mark

[pstockley]

Resolution and accuracy are both important for your application. If the cutter positioning isn't accurate you will end up with overruns and gouges.

Given your limited budget, the only thing I can think of is retrofitting one of these

http://www.grizzly.com/products/item...emnumber=G0463

I think someone on the forum sells retrofit kits and you will have to piece together a controller, PC and Mach 3. I would use servos and high quality rolled ballscrews (hiwin) or better yet ground ballscrews (you find them sometimes on ebay). For your application you want to reduce backlash to the absolute minimum.

The only problem I can see is that the top spindle speed is really too slow for the small cutters you will be using. However, it would work and you could look at fitting a faster spindle in the future. Or perhaps you could look into a CNC router table instead.