Too good to be true?

If you get down to this end of the island, you should drop into House Of Tools. They may have the same thing on the floor, .....or not. Worth checking though. Saves a lot of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ in ferry fares. They have a catalogue on line.

Steve R. in Sooke

The variable speed usually indicates it's a Sieg mill. see

I've seen cheaper prices. But there is shipping, etc. to consider.

>

With the Loonie at 0.79 it could be a better price than it looks at first.

One feature to consider for a small mill (or larger mill/drill machines), is the spindle taper. The machine you linked to has a Morse #3 taper. Tooling is generally less expensive for R8 taper tooling.

Adapters arereadily available for R8 to MT2 or MT3, but uncommon for MT3 to anything other than MT2 or MT1.

Both the R8 and MT3 types of tooling are for drawbar mounting to provide secure mounting.

WB ......... metalworking projects

Yes it looks very similar to the mini-mill at Harbor Freight.

I suppose that price is in Canadian dollars. Not sure how that compares to U.S. dollars right now. A year to two back you could expect to pay about 45% more in Can.$ than US$ but I think they are much closer to par right now. (Is our $ sliding downhill? ;-) )

Your basic minimill. There are some variations, so it's worth investigating. For the minis, this site has a ton of info:

that they have a great section on all of the varieties of the lathes as well.

So basically, yes, it's the same as the Grizzly/HF/Seig/etc. By reputation, Busy Bee is on a par with Grizzly for support, a step or two above HF. --Glenn Lyford

I don't have hands-on experience with it or any other mini-mill except the Sherline, which is too small. Arbors and collets are easier to find for an R8 spindle.

Users manual:

Parts and accessories:

Michael,

I would not reject a mill on the sole grounds for having a M3 spindle taper.

On a small mill the space between table top and spindle nose is at a premium, consequently you will want to keep the cutting tools as close to the spindle nose as possible. This would require collets, and from personal experience M3 collets hold the tool much tighter than R8 collets.

M3 collets are advertised in the Home Shop Machinist, and I have used a set for about 20 years. I used R8 collets professionally and I thought they did a very poor job of holding cutters. With R8 collets the cutter may pull out, that is why end mill holders with a set screws are sold. With an M3 collet I have never had this happen.

I arranged for a "jacking" type draw bar in my mill. This draw bar pushes the collet out of the spindle nose so you don't have to beat the daylight out of the draw bar end to get the collet to release; M3 collets hold very tightly and require a healthy thump to release otherwise.

Also, Morse taper shanks with a soft and unmachined ends cost less than $10 each and are suitable for making special cutter holders for boring heads and fly cutters.

Wolfgang

House of Tools is my second home (after Canadian Tire). Here is theirs:

Fro all I know they are identical but the price is not. As it happens I was going to go to Vancouver this week anyway - the quarterly visit to Summit tools, KMS, Lee Valley and Busy Bee as well as a few well chosen sushi houses, Floata for dim sum and the Dynamo fencing club.

Summit tools have an insane sale on: The savings on a router would cover the cost of the ferry alone.

Oh yes, and Warriors and Wonders on Cambie for the high end cutlery...

Thanks.

Much food for thought. As someone else suggested I am looking at another mill sold locally for $200 more. Just comparing the specs including accessories the latter mill has a 3/4 HP motor compared with less than 1/2 HP for this one. It also comes with a drill chuck and a "quick change collet chuck" including 8 collets. None of this is mentioned with the Busy Bee one. The Z travel is full 21/4 inches more.

I had a look at the costs of end-mill holders for MT3 and they are double that of R8. I surmise I would need at least two - 3/8 and 1/2? The collets as well as the drill chuck, however, would give additional versatility?

I wonder if one added all the extras whether the local purchase might work out about the same.

The additional problem is that one cannot always trust the specs as printed - House of Tools has been wrong in the past!

Things are never simple...

I got mine for $495 (I think) on sale a couple years ago. Since I have a Bridgeport, this was for carting around to shows to show off my CNC control gizmos. I wanted a "square" column, ie. no round column that the head can swing around on when raised or lowered.

It is not a great machine, but it does work, sort of. The X-Y base is really not too bad, but 4" of Y travel is a big limitation. The X axis has a pair of ball bearings constraining one end of the screw, but amazingly the Y axis just has a shoulder of the screw pressing against the bushing. This may work marginally for manual use, but was a real problem for a CNC retrofit. I bored the Y bearing block to accept a pair of ball bearings, and it has worked amazingly well.

The spindle drive has plastic gears, and a top speed of ~2000 RPM. For the kind of work you'd be likely to do on such a machine, that is going to be another limitation. I could imagine doing a lot of work with 1/8" carbide end mills, but you;d want more like 10,000 RPM for that. (But, I do the same thing on my Bridgeport at 2720 RPM, so it can be done.)

Also, you REALLY want the R-8 version of this machine, unless you already have a shop full of #3 Morse Taper tooling. Much more stuff is available in R-8 that is almost impossible to get in Morse, like stub milling arbors, slitting saw arbors, end mill holders, fly cutters, indexable carbide end mills, etc.

Yes, every tool supplier has this same machine, often at a lower price (although it may have shot up due to the recent financial turmoil).

I finally found a REAL use for this machine, however! I converted it to CNC years ago, first with steppers, then with servos, and took it to shows for demos. One of the production parts I make is a mounting plate for servo amps. Blanks are cut from 1/8" aluminum, milled square and bent, then they need to be drilled and tapped. I had been using a Procunier tapping head on the Bridgeport, and it works fairly well, but is an incredibly long and wobbly assembly hanging about

11" out of the Bridgeport's quill. But, using "thread drills" and the reversing drive in the Procunier, it can drill, tap and retract the tap in one smooth operation. Due to the way the Bridgeport head is built, it is REALLY hard to fit an encoder to the spindle to accomplish rigid tapping. The mini-mill, however, has the top bearing preload nut right on top of the head! So, I fitted an encoder with index pulse to it and adapted some timing pulleys to the spindle and encoder. I then hooked up a servo amplifier to the spindle motor, so it could be reversed under computer control. Voila, rigid tapping on a $500 machine (with a few additions)!

See the bottom picture at

for the spindle encoder setup.

Jon

see

{also available in #2MT}

also see

?ProductID=1608&category={other fractional/metric sizes available but 3/8 and 1/2 will cover almost all the endmills you will ever use}

Unka' George [George McDuffee]

------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

see

?ProductID=1608...> {other fractional/metric sizes available but 3/8 and 1/2 will

Michael wrote:

"...I had a look at the costs of end-mill holders for MT3 and they are double that of R8. I surmise I would need at least two - 3/8 and 1/2? The collets as well as the drill chuck, however, would give additional versatility?... "

If you get a M3 spindle nose I would not bother with the set screw type endmill holders. The M3 collet holds the cutter securely.

The size range of M3 collets is up to 3/4" dia... same as R8. Just buy a 1/8", 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", & 3/4" capacity collets. Heck, CDCO Machinery has an ad in the current issue of HSM listing 7 x M3 collets (1/8" to 3/4" inclusive) for $53 US! To hold drill chucks I simply fitted them with a parallel shank and hold them in an appropriate collet. M3 blank end stub arbors are $6.50 US by a different advertiser in HSM, who also has threaded M3 arbors suitable for threaded drill chucks, $6.90 for 3/8"-24UNF and $7.50 for 1/2-20UNF /

5/8-16UNF. Less than $100 for this stuff and you are good to go! Unca George pointed out a source of M3 blanks with a 1.5" dia.x 1.5" long soft end, large enough to adapt for any tooling one is likely to use in a mini-mill.

On a small mill you are unlikely to use any large face mills or similar tools. In any case a cutter with a 3/4" shank held in a M3 collet is a pretty robust set-up.

All I am saying here is don't discount a good deal simply because the spindle nose is M3. Personally I would pick M3 over R8 any day; of course I am prejudiced... I have used both tapers in a milling machine and own one with a M3 spindle nose.

Wolfgang

I have both the collet and weldon style holders. It is much easier to change the endmills in the weldon style with a setscrew, which may not be a consideration if you don't change the endmill frequently. The MT is not self-releasing and you will need some way to jack the collet back out of the spindle. Both styles hold the tool securely.

You are correct that you only need the 3/8 and 1/2 sizes for most [all?] tooling.

Unka' George [George McDuffee]

------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

---------- PS to my own message.

While the Weldon set-screw style end mill holders are indeed easier to change the end mills, these also extend 2 to 3 inches below the bottom of the spindle and depending on what you are doing this loss of spindle to table distance can be a show stopper.

This is why I have both.

Unka' George [George McDuffee]

------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

I have just learned that this mill is going on sale for $699 in November. Is there no end to temptation...?

Geez, Michael,

At that price, including the collets, why don't you end this torture and buy the thing??:-)).

Suppose the price goes down by $50 or $60 over the next 3 months or so, so what? You will have missed out on 3 months of pleasurable occupation. Is this not worth the possible savings?

So end this torture, of all of us, already:-)).

Wolfgang

On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:05:25 -0700, the infamous "Michael Koblic" scrawled the following:

In the words of some immortal, anonymous lad,

"Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself."

-- Change is the process by which the future invades our lives. -- Alvin Toffler

I feel your pain...:-)