I have been trying to convince my bosses to invest in our first CNC mill for years now, instead of farming some jobs out to other shops, but they are so cheap, that it has been an uphill battle. They don't want to spend more then $10,000 and realistically I don't think you can find a quality 3-axis CNC knee mill that has not been worn out for under $20,000. Now I am talking Canadian funds and not US.

I recently came across a couple of Hurco KM3P mills for sale by a shop about an hour away and was just curious how good these types of mills are and what
should I be looking out for if we decide to go have a look at them? What warning signs should we be looking for to tell use these machines are worn out or going to be money pits?

The seller posted a video in their online ad of one of the machines running, but I thought the spindle sounded noisy. I looked at some other video people have posted on youtube of the same model machine and some of them sounded just as noisy and others didn't.

We mainly do low production at my work and most of that is custom jobs. I would prefer to get a HAAS MiniMill, but I know my bosses will never part with that sort of money, so I figured if I could find a low cost mill, to at least get us into doing some CNC work in-house and overtime they would see the benefits and perhaps be willing to invest in a better machine in the future.

Any advice or input would be welcome.