[pollock9131]

I am also trying to decide between a taig micro mill or the grizzly mini mill. Any help deciding would be much appreciated.

[Jeff-Birt]

I'm a Taig dealer, so my comments may be biased but...

First let me related why I became a Taig dealer. My 'full-time' job is as a research engineer for a university. We were looking for a low cost bench top CNC mill for a research project we are doing with Boeing and Rockwell Automation. The project involves thrashing bearings and we chose the Taig for it simple repairable spindle design, availability of parts, and good price. Taig was also very nice to deal with and offered lots of advice.

My initial thoughts were that it would do 'OK', but having two labs of big industrial size machine tools to use (both US and import) at my disposal, I was not suspecting to be impressed. We got the mill in and it was quite easy to set up. We rand some test projects and I was impressed with how well it worked and how well it was built.

Before the project got into the full swing of thrashing the spindle bearings I needed to whip up a few signal conditioning circuit boards for the project. I typically use a little (old) Dyna 2400 for this but decided to try it on the Taig. Wow did it work great. The increased table travel and speed over the old Dyna won me over. It was at that time I inquired about becoming a dealer. Taig makes quality American made tools and are going to be there to stand behind them.

Objectively, I would choose the Taig over the Mini-Mill hands down. The Taig machines are just tighter and made better. If you get up into the X3 size mill, it is quite a bit bigger than either the mini-mill or the Taig but still suffers from relatively 'loose' Chinese construction. Nothing wrong with a lot of Chinese made stuff but a lot of the machine tools are made to a price point more than to a quality standard. The same is true comparing the Enco equipment I have in one lab to the Bridgeport and Clausing tools in the other.

So, no matter who you purchase it from I would recommend the Taig. But, drop me a line or visit my website: www.soigeneris.com if you decide to go Taig. (Note: I just got the Taig stuff online last night, but have not activated the shopping cart yet.)

[Hirudin]

I'll make this short...

I chose a Taig mill over a Grizzly SuperX3. The biggest reasons were the price, ease of setup, and expected quality. I think I hit the nail on the head with all 3.

Price - The Taig is ~$1050 "CNC ready" - the SX3 is ~$1400 for just a manual mill, to make it "CNC ready" would be at least $350 more. The $350 CNC Fusion kit doesn't come with new screws/nuts though - see "Expected Quality" below.

Ease of Setup - Not many mills come from the factory ready to have stepper motors bolted on. As a newbie I didn't want to have to do a bunch of disassembly/reassembly just to get it up and running. I like to think of myself as pretty mechanical, but it amazes me that I CNC-milled a piece of aluminum the very same day that I got my computer/drivers/motors set up!

Expected Quality - Taigs are "made" in the USA. I'm not sure what that means exactly (check out Leatherman tools for more info), but it does suggest that Americans (read: higher paid therefor higher skilled people) had a fair amount of involvement in the manufacturing of their mills/lathes. I don't have anything against Chinese goods, but the main reason a business would produce something in China is cheap labor. Grizzly has a good reputation for quality control, but I didn't want to worry about getting a "good one" or a "lemon" with my first mill purchase.