I Bought A Minimill to see if they are Worth It

Well, as usual, I let my curiosity get the better of me and finally went and

bought

a mini Mill. You see, I've noticed a lot of online forms discussing these things and people really seem to like to attack them and I'm not convinced, so At the risk of proving all the people on the Internet right, let's look at this now. I could be completely off base on this, but the complaints I see sound roughly parallel to what people are saying about the mini lathe and I've always been impressed with the capabilities of that thing despite the online insistence that it doesn't.

They can be used to cut anything harder than a potato. The complaints appear to fall into one of the following categories. They cannot be used for steel, only for aluminum and plastic.

they

cannot be used to achieve reasonable tolerances on parts and then

they

are specific to the type of mini Mill. I have the swing column that supposedly keeps coming off the tram, so what I want to do is put these mini M myths to the test and to see how. This list is accurate, but before we get to that, we need to do some setup to make sure we give this a fair chance.

First, we need to clean the package and grease, which also gives us a chance. To look at the duv tails as far as I can tell they look pretty respectable, at least I don't see any strange lumps or bumps on them and once the Gibs are tightened and the mill is bolted to the table everything feels really solid and I'll take a couple of minutes here to give you a quick warning in case you get one of these. This thing needs to be screwed together. It's very heavy and it would be very unpleasant if this were to unexpectedly fall into your lap while you're at it. in the middle of cutting something, so don't put it off like I've been doing with the mini lathe and screw your mill, okay, with that PSA done and now that mill isn't going to fall into our lap halfway through the video. we can start marking everything.

I put together a simple alignment jig to hold my dial indicator and did a sweep to check the alignment with some precision hammering. I was quickly able to adjust it to less than 1,000 of an inch drop across the bed. I'm pretty happy with this, we could probably spend more time getting it closer, but I would like a tension indicator for that and this is good enough for me, the y-AIS proved a little harder to align. I initially thought the shims would have to go on this swivel interface here, but I realized we could undo the L bracket on the column and shim the column to align it.

This was the closest I could get with the soda can shims, but should allow for a better fit. you get closer if you choose to go this route. One thing I won't argue with the internet about is the claim that these gears are very loud. Well, I guess not that much, but it's louder than I want. I tried to follow the gear. lubrication and mesh adjustment instructions that come in the user manual for this grinder, but they didn't seem to do much to calm it down. I think this means we'll have to upgrade the belt drive, so let me know if you're interested in watching it and I'll add it to the video list to cool down.

I think that's enough setup for the day. Let's set up a vise and make some real cuts. I have a slot I want to cut for a socket. I've been working on it and this seems like a good place to start, so I mounted a 4mm router bit on it. I'm just kidding. Between you, you are in the middle of a comment telling me not to mill with the Jacobs Chuck. For those who are worried, don't worry. I made sure to get a proper er32 collet holder and matching collet set when I

bought

the mill, so I promise there will be no more two-sketch clamping setups for me, so I guess it's time for us.

To prove our first myth, can the mini mill cut steel? This bushing, for better or worse, is made from one piece of steel rod. Believe it on the Internet or not. I turned down the mini, wait how did that sketchy boring bar setup get there? quick, next clip, okay, that's closer, although starting to do some milling brings up a strange Quirk of this thing: the hand wheels move the bed at 62 1/2 mils per revolution, which is just horrible to drive. I don't want to throw. more tools on anything for a moment, so instead of a drro I wrote a program on my workshop calculator to determine the number of drop revolutions plus the remaining thousands to draw on in the plus and minus direction.

I definitely recommend doing this if you don't get a drro it makes things a lot easier to follow so I guess it's the Moment of Truth, time to get this working. Wow, that was extremely smooth, honestly a little smoother than I expected. I guess it's a pretty small mill, so maybe we should try something. With a bit more aggressive cutting, I have some aluminum that I need to square up for another project, so let's try it with a larger router bit. Did you see how it looks like the tram moved a little while we were cutting?

This could be my Although I suspected I didn't tighten the locking bolt enough, I was really worried about overtightening it while working on it, let's tighten it properly this time and we'll give it another chance and with a myth down, let's see if I can come up with anything useful for try the other two, I mean come on, we're tool collectors or we're makers, wait no, as for what to do, I figured making some T-slot nuts is kind of a right of passage. when it comes to getting a new mill, so let's do it and in the spirit of a proper test, I took a piece of steel from the cold world.

Luckily, the meal came with a couple of T-slot nut samples, so I grabbed one and measured it, which gives us some good dimensions to try to hit. I cut a section of the bar to about the right size to make four and installed one on the mill because I don't know exactly how far I can push this mill I started. With a cutting depth of 20 just to remove the saw marks, once I removed the saw marks I raised the cutting depth to about 40 to get it to the dimension we needed and got equally good results, that's pretty satisfactory I think I should try cutting the side profile without moving the Z axis.

I'm thinking about a 20th cut width at a time and full depth. Seems like a good number for conventional milling, of course, I love those chips. H, okay, that's not good, what happened here, oh wow, I definitely got distracted while I was filming and completely forgot to mill the sides to Dimension after squaring up the stock. Don't worry, that can be fixed by simply replacing the piece in the vise and cutting the. extra material now to turn it over and do the same with the top section of the tee and we should finish Milling the last things at the end I changed the mill to low speed and drilled and tapped a hole in the middle I don't know about you but this looks like a nut to me with T-slot and checking the dimensions I would say it's not bad at all before we go let's break out that 12mm milling cutter again and see if we get more change when we cut with it.

I'm going for about 10,000 depths of cut to simulate quick, light surface cleaning like before, but right now we'll be doing it on steel and not aluminum. Is anyone else feeling a little nervous? Well, great, zero everywhere. I think that completes our list. I'll call it 2 myths and 1 half solved here, the rocker column looks like it can be a problem if you don't tighten it enough and even though it didn't budge once I tightened it all the way down, my confidence is shaken so I'm probably going to make some changes in the future to maybe make that connection a little more rigid in any case, that's all I have for now.

I hope you enjoy the video and see you next time.