I Bought A Mini Mill - Unboxing, Overview And First Impressions | Sieg X2.7l

well i've just gotten a pretty big delivery and i'm not exactly sure what's in it it's either a brand new machine or a long-lost artifact that probably belongs in a museum somewhere i don't know about you but that's a pretty familiar red paint [Applause] well ladies and gentlemen what we have here is 103 kilos of the finest machined cast iron china has to offer it's been a pretty long time since i've bought a machine from china and one thing i don't miss is cleaning off the thick layer of anti-corrosion grease that they coat these things in they put a lot less on than they used to but it still is a pain wax and grease remover should do the trick but i know i'm going to be finding this stuff in odd places for the next five months with it moderately cleaned up let's mount it to a workbench this can't take that long you join me about a week later the mill is mounted and bolted to a steel frame bench turns out making the bench took a lot longer than i thought it would i'd show you the world job that i did but i'm not a great stick welder so just take my word and believe that they look beautiful but enough of that let's focus on what we're all here for this is my new milling machine more specifically it's a sig 2.7 l the same brand as the lathe you're all probably familiar with just to give you a quick rundown on the specs it's 750 by 620 by 880 it's fitted with the extra long table that's 700 by 160 the headstock travel is 290 millimeters that's movement in the headstock plus 700 millimeters of travel with the quill the table travel is 500 by 190 and that effectively makes up the work area and it's powered by a 750 watt brushed dc motor and it has a morse 3 taper spindle the total cost that i paid for this was about 1500 australian plus shipping you also get the regular accessories hex keys several size wrenches two t-slot nuts an oiler bottle and a c wrench and for what i paid i'm pretty happy with what i got now a few of you might ask why did i go and buy mill considering that i already have two really good legs and to answer that i have three answers number one being it's been close to four years since i last used a proper vertical mill and i really want to brush up on my skills hopefully learn a few new tricks and have fun along the way unlike a lathe i'm mostly self-taught when it comes to mill skills so it's going to be great to learn some new skills number two lathes and mills are similar but they work using pretty much inverse principles and as a result they do produce or at least specialized in producing the opposite types of work lathes hold and spin a workpiece and a tool is used to remove material this allows you to make really accurate parts with a cylindrical profile a mill however holds and spins the cutter and moves that into a stationary workpiece this coupled with the extra axis of movement allows you to make really accurate square cuts now in the past i have said you can use a lathe as a mill and i've done it several times simply chucking and mill into the chuck and move it into the work and you effectively have a mini mill a more permanent solution that other people have done would be to fix a vise to a vertical slide to give you that third axis of movement but here lies another issue the work area is tiny you can only cut from below the center of the chuck to the bed and that's only about 90 mils and once you account for the vice it's going to be smaller than that you also only have about 75 mils of cross slide movement and once you go further the lead screw simply runs out you might also ask about the mini mill attachment for my sherline lathe it's a great attachment that has served me well but i still run into the cross slide travel issues and most of my tooling won't fit into it it's a pretty small mill and it just doesn't have the capacity for larger end mills that's not to say i no longer have any use for it because it still has cnc capabilities and that's something that is really invaluable in a workshop and truth be told i really enjoy working with g-code and cnc machines and that brings us back to the big mill it has a really large cutting area and i can mount full size vices on it and i can use really large end mills with it incidentally though this is not the cheapest meal siege offers but in my opinion this mill offers the best value for about five hundred dollars less you can get the seek x2 or the x2l and whilst i am sure those are very capable mills i've seen a lot of people use them the 2.7 in my opinion is better in the long run for two or three big reasons number one being even with the extended bed fitted to the x2 the bed is only 500 mils long and that gives you a cutting area of only about 300 mils long which is a little small for my liking the 2.7 has a cutting area which is 20 centimeters wider and i'm not saying i'll be using the full cutting area every time but i do know running out of cutting area is a common complaint with the x2 the second big issue for me is that the x2 has a tilting column it's held to the base using a bolt on the back of the column and in theory it allows you to easily tilt the column and cut at an angle but in practice this makes the head really difficult to tram in i.e getting the column perpendicular to the table the 2.7 however has a solid column design which is bolted to the bed using four bolts this offers a lot more rigidity and it's much easier to tram in finally this mill has a much bigger motor it's 750 watts versus 350 watts overall i'm really impressed with the build quality at least compared to my experience with the lathe the slides feel really great and smooth with the next to no play in the gives the surfaces are really nicely machined and it was properly trammed in at the factory obviously we have yet to see how it holds up long term but so far i'm pretty impressed each slide is equipped with a lock and my only real complaint here is the quill lock which is just a hex bolt i'd prefer to have a handle but that should be an easy fix surprisingly the hand wheels are actually made from metal and each of them has setable dials and the action is really smooth unlike the mini lathe though the pitch of the lead screw is two mils rather than one mil so for every rotation of the hand wheel the table will advance two millimeters interestingly though the longitudinal hand wheel has a spring-loaded dog clutch meaning you need to push the hand wheel into the clutch to engage it i was a little bit confused at first but i eventually realized that this is done so in the event of you getting an auto feed the hand wheel won't spin when you're auto feeding which is a pretty smart solution now on every machine tool backlash is going to be unavoidable but here it's actually pretty low out of the box however i will need to get my head around accounting for backlash in both directions something that you don't usually have to do on a lathe on a lathe you just back it out and then back it forwards to get rid of the backlash here it's going to be unavoidable i'm going to have to account for the backlash when going in both directions i could skirt this by getting a dro and eventually i will do that but first i want to learn the basics and then get a dro speaking of dros the quill actually has one so when you do set the tool height what you'll do is you'll use the column to set the general height and then lock it and then use the fine adjustment and the quill to select your depth of cut i didn't mention it earlier but as standard this mill will come with a b16 jacobs chuck the jacobs chuck is really good for holding twist drills and drilling holes but is probably a last resort for holding end mills i mean you can do it i've seen it done but the run out won't be amazing and the jaws are just too hard to properly hold on to the hardened end mill so to remove it we need to remove the drawbar the drawbar being what distinguishes this from being a glorified drill press i mean this is a super accurate and rigid drill press but it is so much more than that the drawbar effectively holds the chuck in place this is a morse three table tool an ambossary taper is really good at holding compressive loads but any side loading is going to cause it to simply pop out that's why you can't use a drill press as a mule just by adding one of those sliding tables the chuck will just pop out the second you get a side load now this mill has a morse 3 taper but i am aware that they do sell digs with r8 tapers and they are probably the preferred taper over morse three for mills but since my lathe has a morse three spindle taper i'd rather have my tooling be interchangeable than needing to use one of those adapters leaves so to hold my end mills i'm going to be using a collet set this one here is an er32 collet set and shark i've ordered some extra end middles but they have yet to arrive so for this test i'm going to be using a smaller quarter inch end mill in fact a fair amount of my tooling is yet to arrive the vise that i mounted is just an ender financial year freebie that came with the mill it's good enough for low tolerance parts but i'm definitely going to be getting a better one soon one hidden cost of milling at least compared to using a lathe is actually the cost of tooling an envel is a much more complex cutting tool at least compared to a single point lathe tool that you typically grind yourself and unless you are super skilled at sharpening or have a proper grinding jig sharpening end mills is going to be a big ask so expect the cost of tooling to be a fair amount greater than that of using a lathe one thing you will need to supply yourself is threaded rod and flange nuts in order to bolt the equipment to the table [Applause] [Applause] machines look like butter that's a pretty decent cut [Music] [Applause] it cut it but i know i need to brush up on my feeds and speeds it wasn't happy with it [Applause] and that does it for my first impressions for the mule so far i am very impressed and i know it has a lot more to give and i have a lot more to learn expect to see this machine in a lot more future videos because i have a lot planned for us hope you enjoyed this thank you very much for watching see you next time

Channel: Artisan Makes

Views: 190,582

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Id: 2rw4nf4HMX0

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021