Hi folks,

Been lurking on here for quite a while and thought I'd finally ask some advice. I'm just about to take the plunge and buy myself a mill and convert it to CNC.

Never used or ran a mill before but spent the last year tricking the hell out of a 7x14 mini lathe, which I've enjoyed.

I want the mill for making general household gadgetry, parts for my motorbikes, camera parts and all sorts of other misc things.

I've pretty much decided I want one of the BF type mills as I gather they offer the best quality:cost ratio and are fairly easy to convert. I can't decide to go for the big one (250kg) or the smaller version (140kg).

The factors I'm considering are:

1) The smaller one is cheaper so I could splash out on things like a rotary table and more tooling to begin with. I could get these eventually either way but I'd feel happier buying more things at the outset if I'm saving £500 on the mill itself.

2) I work almost entirely with steel due to availability to me

3) I think if I'm going to the effort of CNC'ing it, then it may be worth buying the larger one (I somewhat regret spending so much time on my mini lathe now, as I'm going to get a bigger one shortly!)

4) I sometimes think having CNC negates some of the advantage of the large mill? Aside from marginally less table travel, the small mill will do everything the large one does (just requiring more passes)...? But a small mill with extra tooling can do more than a large mill with less tooling?

Would very much appreciate any advice or opinions from those who've been down this route already.

Cheers,