recomendations for table top milling setups? (2025 Update)

Yes, with some limitations

It wouldn't be a bad way to go, and probably considerably less expensive to get started, but compared to the Taig, you're giving up a lot of Z capacity and rigidity. You're not going to cut steel with a router.

Mach3 has not been updated in over a decade. LinuxCNC has been continually updated and improved. The trajectory planner got a major update a couple years ago to improve contouring speed and other things. LinuxCNC can also handle non-cartesian machines (delta robots, hexapods and classic robots (serial kinematics) so they can be programmed in cartesian (XYZ) coordinates even though the joints are completely non- cartesian.

There's always something being improved in LinuxCNC. And, if you find a bug, it is often fixed within days.

Jon

That atom-moving video is pretty cool

I'm not so sure that four-point type is out of reach of reasonably priced machinery. You don't have high cutting forces, so you can use spring-loaded anti-backlash nuts without a problem, and both mach3 and linuxcnc (to which I am strongly leaning) have the capability of compensating for irregularities in motion (lead (or ball)screw mapping). As I said, I am regularly getting better than 0.001" repeatability on a leadscrew taig.

Also, on the subject of (free) software, have a look at

thinking of doing some small (and I do mean _small_) milling, to make a set of molds for casting type for hand setting printing (aka "Letter Press"). Not sure it is a cost effective method of getting a font, but this would be a hobby, not a business. Unless maybe I get into the type casting foundry bizz.

So, what I am looking for is something which can give good precision at the .005 inch level. (I'm sure, finding the mills is going to be another issue, but one thing at a time.)

I right-justified it on my screen but it doesn't read back that way.

Gunner Asch snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Tue, 02 Jul 2019 16:42:26 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Dunno how to do that either.

Gunner Asch snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Tue, 02 Jul 2019 16:39:29 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

I'm at the "I've no real idea what the scope of this project will be" stage, other than to figure "It is going to be somewhere between industrial sized and a metric buttload."

When I get the current dozen projects done, then I'll be addressing this.

A 90 year old geezer fantasizing about Civil War. Doesn't get any more pathetic...

"Jim Wilkins" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Wed, 3 Jul 2019 07:28:18 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Which is so totally what I do NOT want to do.

If I wanted build a printer, I'd have asked how to do that.

I'm also struggling with difficult tasks I don't fully understand yet, making and using man-powered log handling equipment for my homemade sawmill. These log weigh up to half a ton and need to be lifted from storage and moved over the track, rolled to inspect and best compensate for irregularities, then lowered into position and set at different heights on the ends since they taper.

Observing and researching what the problems are and how others have addressed them has been very helpful, although I have found my own apparently unique solutions which work quite well.

Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination...

One can get job-shops to do the 3D printing; the old IBM typeballs were nickel-plated plastic, seemed to print entirely adequately.

Or (in linotype fashion) you could carve some soft material to make a matrix, then cast type against that. Instead of a mill, the matrices could be (old technology) produced with a pattern lathe.

Milling anything hard, and keeping tight tolerances, is a difficult combination. Clamping any workpiece as small as a letter is a project all in itself.

whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Thu, 4 Jul 2019 15:36:44 -0700 (PDT) typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

From what I've been reading: there is an Iron letter "punch" which then stamps into a softer metal (copper) which then serves as the mold for the lead type. As they were carving punches (to make coins) in Mainz in the 1300's, I'm going to assume I can short cut a few steps and use modern material science to my advantage.

Gunner Asch snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Thu, 04 Jul 2019 12:50:25 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Sometime I want to do something a little old school. Maybe even before old school. "If John from the Jewish Hill can make it by hand ..."

Considering that the earliest molds were carved in iron with very small /fine tolerances - "What could go wrong?"

As with some many things, it is a gas seeing people working with CAD Cam (and the like) to reproduce "analog" mechanical systems & devices From the "original" CGI videos

Along comes the Marble Machine.

Some times, I want to do it the old fashioned way. Sometimes, the way before the old fashioned way was invented.

Fnord, I saw a video about Masahiro Kikuno making a "temporal clock" watch. This is a watch which keeps "natural time" i.e., every day has 12 even hours of daylight. Yeah. So I've been mulling the calculations necessary to compute that, sidereal v tropical time, that the day is an average over a year, blah, blah ... . Yeah, I do need a life. But sometimes, for what I want, "knowing why power tools were invented" s part of the process.

Leon Fisk snipped-for-privacy@gmail.invalid on Thu, 4 Jul 2019 16:33:56 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Yep.

and sometimes I can do it "by hand" means I don't have to find space for A Machine.

How did that 'carving' happen, though? The use of a copper disk charged with abrasive was known millenia ago, that's how Romans got carved gemstones. Milling with a needle point can do things, but the needle which will cut soapstone or wood or graphite, won't do much in type metal. The graphite, though, can plunge-EDM just about any suitable metal.

Up til the 'greenback' dollar of 1862, the veins of a leaf were etched into the printing plates to make a hard-to-duplicate pattern. So, chemical machining of plates does qualify as an antique procedure, too.