I need help picking cnc mill

Good afternoon.
A little background on me, I'm a 32 year old student at Hennepin Tech in Brooklyn Park, MN. I've taken every machining class that this school offers, and I've just landed a gig as a machinist. Here's the problem:
My machines are manual, not CNC, and my bosses don't understand machining. It's a small shop, and we build CNC saws for companies that build trusses for building homes and such. My boss is an engineer, and the "foreman"is a lumber worker. We've got a fabricator and a mechanic.

The machines I have right now are a Rong Fu Mill drill and a jet lathe. The jet is actually a nice machine, but as you can imagine or testify, the Rong Fu is a pile of trash.

I am working with hot rolled steel, exclusively. Since the company is from Australia, everything is metric (inconvenient when getting materials) so I have to do a lot of sizing.

That's the back story. I'm trying to convince the owner that if he gets a cnc mill for me, that he's going to save a ton of money in the long run. Right now we send a lot of work out to a shop for laser cutting, and I can do ALL that if I had a cnc machine.

In school I worked on a Bridgeport EZ TRAK, and I got familiar with it. I'm thinking something like that would be a good candidate, but my experience is limited. I'm pretty sure I can convince him, but he's not going to want to go to ER collets, and he's already offering a monster mill from Taiwan that's available with a cnc control, but he's getting it without.

Do any of you have a suggestion for a heavy use mill that has 2 or 3 axis cnc operation, that isn't going to break his bank account, but will still handle the 20" long parts I make?
Oh, I'd prefer to not need any CAM software

Thank you for the assistance

Run away my son

Speedie said:

Run away my son

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Yes. You can lead a horse to water...

rukwikenuf said:

Right now we send a lot of work out to a shop for laser cutting, and I can do ALL that if I had a cnc machine.

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In school I worked on a Bridgeport EZ TRAK, and I got familiar with it. I'm thinking something like that would be a good candidate ...

Do any of you have a suggestion for a heavy use mill that has 2 or 3 axis cnc operation, that isn't going to break his bank account

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does not compute

Want my job? Seriously, moving in less than two weeks, and they may need someone to replace me. You get all the heavy CNC machine you need!

I don't see why you would be running parts you have laser cut on a CNC mill. Sure, you could likely do it but it is the totally wrong tool for the job. You would only want to use the mill for non 2D stuff. Think about how slow and expensive it is to run a mill to cut a 2D part compared to those... and that's assuming all of your parts don't have small inside corners where you could use a large enough cutter that didn't literally take 20x or longer to cut the same part as the laser. And, that assume this is thick metal... mills and thin sheet metal don't play so nicely. That sounds like a non-starter if you approached your boss with that as a solution and he would probably think less of you for even proposing it. The solution to that would be to get a proper laser/plasma rig in-house if there was a real need for it.

If you're doing enough parts that can't be cut by a laser/plasma/wj on your mill/drill, then by all means get a CNC mill. What you're going to get depends on how big the parts are, how many and fast you need, and what you have to spend. You can end up getting anything from an old $2,000 dinosaur CNC knee mill to a $200,000+ brand new 4/5 axis VMC. How much are you trying to spend? If you don't want to use CAM software that means your parts will be relatively simple and you'll either need a machine that has Conversational programming or you'll need to learn scratch G-code programming. I think it will be foolish to not use CAM seeing how 2.5D can be had for free and has superior toolpaths to what you can ever do by hand. For one-off or very simple parts is probably the only time you'd want to avoid it.

There are a million different mills, but when you don't need something particular and trying to get it on a budget your options are really limited to what is local to you. So instead of looking for advice on a particular machine that you may never have a chance to buy anyways, go and see what is available and talk to the owners. Go and see how easy/hard it is to run a part you do on that machine. When you find a working machine for the right price that can demonstrate a test part for you and it looks doable to you then you have found your machine.

After you look at a few machines you'll know what will and won't work for you. But from the sound of it since you're getting by with a mill/drill and you could probably get by fine for starters with a CNC Knee Mill and then as the need presents step up to a more capable machine. If you have the money to buy and maintain a VMC that would be even better. There are dozens of options but like I said you may only have a small handful available in your area so you focus on evaluating what is available to you and not hundreds of machines in existence.

Out of interest, which 2.5D CAM can you get for free?
Mike

HSmworks
Delcam for Solidworks
Inventor HSM

I'm sure I'm missing some

lagun with a dynapath control,40 taper.
3 axis
under 5,000 easy!
I have one you can have for that with over a doz. holders,couple drill chucks, kurt 6"vice.
You could help a fab shop a lot with it, I did.
Just sayin,as "they"say.
Gw

Greg White said:

lagun with a dynapath control,40 taper.
3 axis
under 5,000 easy!
I have one you can have for that with over a doz. holders,couple drill chucks, kurt 6"vice.
You could help a fab shop a lot with it, I did.
Just sayin,as "they"say.
Gw

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Damn, that's tempting. I'd love to have it in my garage.

Doug said:

Don't all of those require the base software they run in, like HSMworks needs Solidworks doesn't it?

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Yeah.

So they're not exactly free, especially when the base software costs around $3500..

Fusion360 has included CAM and is free for non-commercial users.. but I don't think that's applicable here either.

Doug said:

Don't all of those require the base software they run in, like HSMworks needs Solidworks doesn't it?

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rlockwood said:

Yeah.

So they're not exactly free, especially when the base software costs around $3500..

Fusion360 has included CAM and is free for non-commercial users.. but I don't think that's applicable here either.

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You can get Solidworks parts & assemblies. Around 2k or less

m98custom1212 said:

You can get Solidworks parts & assemblies. Around 2k or less

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But I mean.. that's not free, right?

rukwikenuf said:

Good afternoon.
A little background on me, I'm a 32 year old student at Hennepin Tech in Brooklyn Park, MN. I've taken every machining class that this school offers, and I've just landed a gig as a machinist. Here's the problem:
My machines are manual, not CNC, and my bosses don't understand machining. It's a small shop, and we build CNC saws for companies that build trusses for building homes and such. My boss is an engineer, and the "foreman"is a lumber worker. We've got a fabricator and a mechanic.

The machines I have right now are a Rong Fu Mill drill and a jet lathe. The jet is actually a nice machine, but as you can imagine or testify, the Rong Fu is a pile of trash.

I am working with hot rolled steel, exclusively. Since the company is from Australia, everything is metric (inconvenient when getting materials) so I have to do a lot of sizing.

That's the back story. I'm trying to convince the owner that if he gets a cnc mill for me, that he's going to save a ton of money in the long run. Right now we send a lot of work out to a shop for laser cutting, and I can do ALL that if I had a cnc machine.

In school I worked on a Bridgeport EZ TRAK, and I got familiar with it. I'm thinking something like that would be a good candidate, but my experience is limited. I'm pretty sure I can convince him, but he's not going to want to go to ER collets, and he's already offering a monster mill from Taiwan that's available with a cnc control, but he's getting it without.

Do any of you have a suggestion for a heavy use mill that has 2 or 3 axis cnc operation, that isn't going to break his bank account, but will still handle the 20" long parts I make?
Oh, I'd prefer to not need any CAM software

Thank you for the assistance

Click to expand...

If you can convince your boss to get you a fancy shmancy 3D CNC to do the work of a laser cutter, get into politics.

Most business owners love it when their new hire gets on an internet forum and then proceeds to bash them, the company, the processes, and the equipment.

Let us know how it works out for you.