What is the best home shop mill?

Message: 20
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 15:24:00 -0000
From: "celestialperceptions" <terra007@...>
Subject: What is the best home shop mill?

I am thinking about buying a cnc mill and I am not sure which one to
get. I want to make aluminum and maybe some steel gun parts. I also
do sculpture and jewelry work. So I think I would need on with a 4th
Axis. What is the most polpular unit for these type of applications.
I was looking at the Maxnc CL series. They seemed fairy reasonable in
price. but some say the steppers are not the best is this true?

[Which is "best" is hard to say. Is price a major consideration? Size? The
MaxNC isn't great for steel, since the frame lacks rigidity and the spindle
arrangement doesn't have much torque at the low end. The closed-loop stepper
system they've worked out is nice, though. It gets good performance from the
motors and eliminates bad parts caused by lost steps. Its main problem
seems to be a tendency to generate servo errors because of interference from
their AC/DC brush-type motors. Unfortunately, MaxNC is not the easiest
company to deal with. I used to sell their products but no longer do so.
Taig/Microproto (which I still represent) makes an excellent desktop-size
mill, which is more rigid and heavy-duty than the MaxNC, as well as being
less expensive than their comparable offering. They also come with a 4th
axis attachment (which, like MaxNC's, is made by Sherline). They provide an
open-loop chopper-drive system with 200 oz/in steppers, although they also
offer a CNC-ready version which can be fitted with any system using 23-frame
motors.]

what
also would be some good software for 4th axis milling and .dxf file
conversion. I have a computer background but am totally new to CNC.
Could some one open my eyes and set me on a good path.

Thanks :)

[For the sculpture and jewelry stuff, look at DeskProto. It's easy to use,
as it's designed for non-machinists, and supports the 4th axis. Gun parts
might require a different approach, though, more like conventional
machining.]

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com