I Bought A Minimill to see if they are Worth It

well as usual I let my curiosity get the better of me and I finally went and got myself a mini Mill you see I've noticed a lot of online forms discussing these things and people really seem to like to bash on them and I'm not convinced so at the risk of proving all the people on the internet right let's check this thing [Music] out now I could be completely off bed with this but the complaints I see on sound roughly parallel to what people say about the mini lathe and I've routinely been impressed with the capabilities of that thing despite the insistence online that they can't be used to cut anything harder than a potato the complaints seem to fall into one of the following categories they can't be used for steel only aluminum and plastic they can't be used to hit reasonable tolerances on parts and then specific to the type of mini Mill I got the tilting column supposedly constantly goes out of tram so what I want to do is put these mini M myths to the test and see how accurate this list is but before we get to that there is some setup that we'll need to do to make sure we give this thing a fair shot first things first we need to get the pack and grease cleaned off which also gives us a chance to look at the duv Tails from what I can tell they look pretty respectable at least I don't see any weird bumps or gabes on them and once the Gibs are tightened and the mill is bolted down to the table Everything feels really solid and I'll take a couple minutes here to provide a quick word of caution in case you get one of these this thing needs to be bolted down it is very topheavy and it would be super unpleasant to have this drop onto your lap unexpectedly while you're in the middle of cutting something so don't put it off like I've been doing with the mini lathe and bolt your Mill down okay so with that PSA over and now that the mill isn't going to fall into our lap mid video we can get started on dialing everything in I threw together a simple alignment jig to hold my dial indicator and did a sweep to check the alignment with a bit of precision hammering I was pretty quickly able to adjust it to a less than 1,000th of an inch drop across the bed I'm pretty happy with this we could probably spend more time dialing it in closer but I'd want a tense indicator for that and this is good enough for me the y- AIS proved slightly more challenging to align I had initially thought the shims would need to go in this rotating interface here but I realized that we could undo the column L bracket and shim the column into [Music] alignment this was as close as I could get with the soda can shims but better shim stock should let 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 crazy loud okay I guess not that loud but it's louder than I want it to be I tried following the gear mesh adjustment and lubrication instructions that came in the user manual of this Mill but it didn't seem to do much to quiet it down I think this means we'll have to make ourselves a belt drive upgrade so let me know if you're interested in seeing that and I'll add it to the list of videos to make cool well I think that is enough setup for the day let's get a visce mounted and do some actual cutting I have a keyway I want to cut for a bushing I've been working on and this seems like as good of a place to start as any so I mounted a 4mm endmill in the I'm just kidding the estud among you are about halfway through a comment telling me not to Mill with the Jacobs Chuck for those who are concerned do not worry I made sure to get a proper er32 collet holder and a set of collets to match when I was buying the mill so I promise no more sket two holding setups for me well then I guess it's time for us to test out our first myth can the mini mill cut steel this bushing for Better or For Worse is made from a piece of Steel Rod which believe the internet or not I turned down on the minithe wait how did that sketchy boring bar setup get in there quick next clip okay that's more like it though starting to do some Milling brings up a weird Quirk of this thing the hand wheels move the bed at 62 1/2 thou per Revolution which is just awful to deal with I don't want to throw any more toolbx at anything for a bit so instead of a drro I wrote a program on my shop calculator to determine the number of fall revolutions plus remaining thousands to turn to in the plus and minus Direction definitely recommend doing this if you don't get a drro it makes things way easier to keep track of so then I guess it's Moment of Truth time will this work wow that was extremely smooth honestly a bit smoother than I expected I guess it is a pretty small endmill though so maybe we should try something with a slightly more aggressive cut I have some aluminum that I need to square up for another project so let's give that a go with a bigger endmill oh did you see that it looks like the tram shifted a bit while we were cutting this could be my fault though I suspected that I didn't tighten down the Locking bolt enough I was really worried about over torquing it while I was working on it let's properly tighten it down this time and give it another shot and with one myth down let's see if we can come up with something useful to make to test out the other two I mean come on are We tool collectors or are we makers wait no that as for what to make I figured that making some t- slot nuts is kind of a right of passage when it comes to getting a new Mill so let's do that and in spirit of doing a proper test I picked up a chunk of cold world steel luckily the meal came with a couple t- slot nut samples so I took one and measured it up which gives us some nice Dimensions to try and hit I cut a section off the bar to approximately the right size to make four of them and got one set up in the mill because I don't know exactly how far I can push this Mill I started off with a 20th depth of cut just to remove the saw marks once I I had the saw marks removed I up the depth of cut to about 40 th to bring it to the dimension that we needed and got similarly good results that's pretty satisfying I think we should try to cut the side profile without moving the z-axis all right I'm thinking about 20 th width of cut at a time at the full depth seems like a good number to shoot for conventional Milling of course o got to love those chips H okay that's not good what happened here oh oops I definitely got distracted while I was filming and completely forgot to Mill the sides to Dimension after squaring up the stock no worries that can be fixed simply by replacing the part in the vice and cutting off the extra material now to flip it and do the same to the upper section of the te and we should be done Milling last things last I switched the mill over into low gear and drilled and tapped a hole in the middle I don't know about you but this looks like a t- slot nut to me and checking on the dimensions I would say that's not too shabby before we go let's break out that 12mm endmill again and see if we get any more shifting when we cut with it I'm going for about 10,000 cutting depths to simulate a light surface cleanup fast like before but at this time we'll do it in steel and not aluminum is anyone else feeling a bit nervous okay cool zero all around I think that about rounds off our list we'll call it 2 and 1 half myths resolved here the tilting column seems like it can be an issue if you don't tighten it down enough and despite the fact that it didn't move once I torqued everything down my confidence is shaken so I'm probably going to make some changes in the future to maybe make that connection a little bit more rigid in any case that's all I got for now I hope you folks enjy enjoy the video and I'll see you next time

Channel: Someone Should Make That

Views: 858,243

Keywords: cx605, SIEG X2, Craftex, mini mill, mini-mill

Id: bC6IgRpptJk

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024