I have been tasked with finding a large bed milling machine for our workshop.

I have been looking for manual machines like Hurons and Anyaks which in the short term would be ideal, but they are a little thin on the ground. There is a better selection with HEIDENHAIN cnc controls but I have little experience of CNC controls but what experience was with Heidenhain controls on Bridgeport Interact 2 and 4's 25 years ago.

In the short term we would use the mill to tackle large reactive jobs, like drilling out broken studs and turning damaged shafts using a boring head plus any other large jobs that needed work. But I can see that we could use this mill in the future to profile cut screen channel guides out of plastic.

My question is: Can these Heidenhain controled cnc milling machines be used fairly easily in a manual mode whilst I get to grips with the programming side of things?