As the title says I'm in the market for a new benchtop mill. My first mill was a manual Taig mill that I purchased middle of last year. Shortly after purchasing it I came across the A2Z Monster Mill in which I had regrets of not finding out about it before purchasing my Taig as I would have chosen the A2Z mill over the Taig. Now on a short note I know function over form is the most important aspect of most any machine but with all honesty I would like a mill that somewhat at least looks a little better than a Taig. Also I'd like this machine to be my first CNC ready machine as playing with my manual Taig mill was a bit painful given how limited things were in manual form.
Also as I am really leaning towards an A2Z Monster Mill one big down factor to me is that I can no longer seem to find a black unit and, a black unit is what I was really after, with no laser engravings on it. I had thought about purchasing a CNC ready unit and taking it apart to have a commercial anodizing shop strip off the existing anodizing and then sanding away at the laser markings and, then re-anodizing all of the pieces in black as I prefer.
Also the other option I also considered is going with something a little bigger like a Grizzly converted to CNC or maybe even a Tormach 770 (though I don't think I really wanna spend that kind of money at the moment given I'd need some special handling equipment to get things setup, hoist, etc etc).
My main uses that I plan to use the mill for would be to make large scale R/C Car & Truck parts, as well as some misc. gun parts (I have some 80% AR lower receivers that I'd really like to have done on a fly rather than manual milling the pockets of them).
Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.