Mini Mill Comparison

hi it's Frank who's from mini live.com today we're going to look at a comparison of the various mini Mills that are sold in the US by a variety of vendors there are at least four vendors in the u.s. that so many Mills and at least five different models that are available and if you look at them on the surface they look pretty similar but if you start digging into the detailed specs you'll find that there are actually quite a few differences that you should be aware of and making your choice and the price can vary anywhere from about 550 on the low end up to close to $1,000 on the high end you might wonder well why is there such a price variation for machines that all look pretty much the same and the reason is there while they're all built in the same Factory in China manufactured by seeing in fact they're built to a variety of different specifications so some of them have larger tables with greater range of movement than others there are at least two different types of motors that are used the classic brush style motor which is kind of a large black motor and the newer and more efficient russell's DC motor which is a smaller and compact motor that's in a brushed aluminum housing so the differences between the motors are significant and there's also a difference in the drive types the ones with brushless motors have belt drive whereas the ones with the classic style motors have gear drive so those are some of the differences that you need to be aware of in making the choice to get the machine that's right for you so I'm going to go into a more detail here and then on my reviews the product reviews of course I go into quite a lot more detail and hopefully those that information will help you to make a good choice and get the machine that's best for you I've created this table to illustrate some of the differences between the various machines and there are four different vendors Harbor Freight LMS or little machine shop comm grizzly and Mike remark and LMS sells two different machines but I've sorted these in sequence by price and the low price here for the Harbor Freight five $20 is based on using one of their 20% off coupons and they are widely available at their stores or online it's my understanding that the mini mill from Harbor Freight is not available in their stores has to be ordered online but the LMS model 49 62 is currently on sale for about $600 normally sells for around 700 that any of these machines made from time to time go on sale grizzly often has sales around the holiday season so you want to check the prices at the time you're getting ready to make your purchase but another thing you need to factor into the freight charges these machines weigh about a hundred and fifty pounds and are shipped in a wooden crate so they're too large to ship by UPS or FedEx and now typically are delivered by a freight truck and you'll probably need a lift gate to unload it off of the truck at your residence so the shipping may run as high as $200 depending on the vendor and how far away you live from the vendor so be sure to include the shipping costs in your calculations but they arranged roughly from five twenty at the low end to about nine hundred at the high end and you might wonder well the machines all look similar why is there such a wide difference in price and a lot of it is the two most expensive machines the micro mark and the LMS 3990 have the brushless DC motor and they also have belt drive and the brushless motor is a much better motor in many respects it has a lot more power and torque than the traditional brush type motor these are as you can see 350 watts these are 500 Watts so they have about 1/3 more power and the brush type motors are somewhat limited in torque at the low end and consequently they have an internal gear drive built into the head of the mini mill and they have a high range and a low range but most of milling work is done in low range now with the brushless motors the brushless motor has enough torque so that the internal gears are not needed they also use a direct belt drive which is quieter and more efficient in less subject to things going wrong sometimes with the gear drive motors if you run into a piece of work you know with a you dig the tool into the work you can sometimes share the teeth off the gears so you need to keep a couple of replacement gears on hand but they work fine and you soon learn to avoid those types of situations for the most part now other differences are the two machines sold by LMS have air Springs to offset the weight of the head the other three have a external torsion spring so torsion spring is mounted on the left side of the head with a steel arm that raises and lowers along with the head to help offset the weight of the head the air spring is a typical air column like you would see on a hatchback car and in my opinion the air spring does a better job of offsetting the weight throughout the entire range of movement and there are also two types of columns in here again the LMS machines are different from the others they have the rigid column that does not tilt the other three have the traditional tilting column which has a big nut and bolt at the base that allows the head to the entire column to be tilted left or right by up to 45 degrees that might seem like a useful feature to have but it has some trade-offs which is it's it's not nearly as a useful in practice as it might seem and it makes it more important that you keep track of the current position of the head so you don't have it tilted when you don't intend to and sometimes when you're doing some heavy machining the head can shift on the tilting type machines without your knowing it or sometimes you do know it but either way if it shifts while you're working that's not a good thing so another thing you want to consider and when you get out here to the dials it's a pretty minor thing but with the exception of the micro mark which is calibrated in 50 thousands per turn the other three are calibrated in 62 and a half thousands per turn which seems like an odd number but that's 1/16 of an inch per turn or it's a 16 threads per inch lead screw whereas the micro mark has a 20 threads per inch lead screw now if you're trying to move for example by one tenth of an inch it's a lot easier to figure that out with the micro mark it's just two turns but if you tried to move a tenth of an inch with these others you have to do a little head scratching or work with a calculator to come up with the right number of turns also the table sizes and range of table motion is different and here again the LMS machines have a greater range of table motion in both the X and the y directions and also have larger tables than the other three machines so as you can see they break out into sort of lms machines tend to have some features that the others don't and the other three are more similar and then the micro mark is kind of in a class by itself in some ways it's a very close most similar to the little machine shop 3990 but it's different from that in several respects it's similar because it has the brushless DC motor in the belt drive but it's different because it has the different calibrations it has the tilting head the torsion spring and the smaller cable size so you have to read the specs carefully and making your choice don't go just by price alone but be sure you understand how some of these other parameters may affect your work before you make your decision it turns out that all of the mini mills sold in the US and most of the eight machine sold worldwide are manufactured by si si eg in Shanghai China and back around 1999 or 2000 when the mini mill first came out that was really just one version but in the years since then SEIG has expanded their product line pretty dramatically and circled here are just the so-called mini meals or the x2 series the see there are six different or seven different variants of the x2 and then they also make various other smaller and larger metals these being called the micro mills and up here the larger bench mills the x 2.3 and so forth and there's even more on another page that are larger mills but even within the x2 series which are what we call the mini mills you can see there are seven variations and that's what accounts for the variants that we saw on the table that we looked at a minute ago so when you're making your choice you do want to be aware of that you can find this at the sig web page which is sigi ND comm and if you look under their product line you can find this and look at the details more closely if you want to do that but these that have the green square by them have the that represents that they're energy-efficient to it because they have the brushless DC motor now in terms of global energy I don't know that it makes that much difference for the amount of time that we run these things but the more important factor with the brushless motor is that it is more powerful and has the belt drive which is really the biggest feature in my mind that makes a difference so but there are variations in table size and the Tilted versus non tilt and various other things you need to be aware of so if you really want to dig in and see the details you can go to the SI website to compare it is however a little bit hard to say ok this is the one that's sold by grizzly and that's the one that's sold by LMS and this is the one sold by Mike remark so I'm not sure that there's an exact correlation between these models and what the vendors sell although they are based on these models that are shown here now another useful resource in making your comparison is this table or chart that can be found on the little machine shop comm website if you go to info center reference shopping guides following the menus it will take you to this table and so this is a pretty deep a more detailed breakdown of the features and ranges of movement and things like that that it's basically the same information I showed you on this chart but with more detail so here again another thing to take a look at and compare making your choice now this model is the 3900 I'm not sure whether that's still available that was a tilt a tilting column version of the mini mill that was sold by LMS but I think they may have discontinued that all right well that wraps up our comparison of the various mini mills and I hope you found that information useful and although it probably didn't answer all of your questions I think if you follow up on the links that I pointed out you can find a lot more information and spend some time pondering the various dimensions and other factors and think about how those will affect your work but it is important that you get a machine that's got the right parameters for what you're trying to do for a lot of us me included you know price is often the determining factor and one approach course is to buy the cheapest machine and once you get that and try it out you get a better sense of what you really need so that's a approach that can work unfortunately you can often so the machines on eBay or Craigslist if you want to move up to a better one and get a good percentage of your money back to put towards a better machine going forward but if you have the opportunity to really think through it you have a good idea about what you want to do starting out then you're probably better off doing the research and thinking upfront and buy the right machine the first time so I hope that's helpful to you and check out my other videos introduction to the mini mill and there will be some others out there and some of the product reviews that I've done and hopefully those will also help you make your choice so good luck to you and thanks for watching and pre-shave if you subscribe then you'll get notified when future videos come out

Channel: Frank Hoose

Views: 91,636

Rating: 4.9358974 out of 5

Keywords: mini mill, milling machine, Sieg mill, mini-lathe.com, Frank Hoose, solid column, tilting head, brushless motor, R8 spindle, end mill

Id: jQByE_hcV5Y

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2016