Hey all,
I've been lurking here for a couple of months now reading as much as I can, and figured I'd reached the point where I had enough context to ask useful questions. The quick summary is that I'm looking to buy a mill for making mostly one off parts and potentially some small production run work for a couple products that my friends and I have been working on.
Longer background - I studied mechanical engineering at Cal Poly SLO, got my degree, passed my first licensing exam, and then moved into software for the past 13 years. I learned how to cast/weld/machine in the school shops, working on world war 2 era manual lathes and similarly ancient mills. A few years back I started doing engineering work again with a crew of folks building large scale art installations for places like Burning Man, and I've been gradually putting more and more effort into my mechanical design and manufacturing work. I'm looking to purchase a CNC mill to build parts for various projects, generally in the range of 10-20 for the larger runs and one offs for the others. I'm a little constrained on shop space so footprint matters to me.
Jobs would range from machining nodes for assembling dome structures, building smaller parts for automated telescopes, and some toys/products that I'm looking to sell. Basically generalist prototype type stuff. I want to be able to get a good surface finish on things, but I think that's more down to the step size than it is the specific tolerances of the mill itself. I've never worked on five axis stuff before but the CAM work actually looks pretty straightforward from what I've seen and I could see it saving a bunch of effort building fixtures for one off parts. I've been looking around at some of the Haas machines and the Brother Speedios, I saw that some folks used the Brother mills for similar sorts of work with good success.
Does anyone have any thoughts on mills that I should look into for this application?
I also wanted to ask about mills in environments where there's multiple types of work going on. Our shop tends to oscillate between woodwork and metalwork, and I've never dealt with larger machines in places where there's occasionally sawdust in the air. I'm obviously not going to be machining wood, I'm just wondering whether its a "don't run the mill when there's woodwork going on in the shop", "don't run the mill when there's woodwork in the shop and make sure you carefully clean it before starting again", "cover the mill with plastic before doing woodwork so the dust is kept out fully", or "this is a bad idea find a different space".
I've been lurking here for a couple of months now reading as much as I can, and figured I'd reached the point where I had enough context to ask useful questions. The quick summary is that I'm looking to buy a mill for making mostly one off parts and potentially some small production run work for a couple products that my friends and I have been working on.
Longer background - I studied mechanical engineering at Cal Poly SLO, got my degree, passed my first licensing exam, and then moved into software for the past 13 years. I learned how to cast/weld/machine in the school shops, working on world war 2 era manual lathes and similarly ancient mills. A few years back I started doing engineering work again with a crew of folks building large scale art installations for places like Burning Man, and I've been gradually putting more and more effort into my mechanical design and manufacturing work. I'm looking to purchase a CNC mill to build parts for various projects, generally in the range of 10-20 for the larger runs and one offs for the others. I'm a little constrained on shop space so footprint matters to me.
Jobs would range from machining nodes for assembling dome structures, building smaller parts for automated telescopes, and some toys/products that I'm looking to sell. Basically generalist prototype type stuff. I want to be able to get a good surface finish on things, but I think that's more down to the step size than it is the specific tolerances of the mill itself. I've never worked on five axis stuff before but the CAM work actually looks pretty straightforward from what I've seen and I could see it saving a bunch of effort building fixtures for one off parts. I've been looking around at some of the Haas machines and the Brother Speedios, I saw that some folks used the Brother mills for similar sorts of work with good success.
Does anyone have any thoughts on mills that I should look into for this application?
I also wanted to ask about mills in environments where there's multiple types of work going on. Our shop tends to oscillate between woodwork and metalwork, and I've never dealt with larger machines in places where there's occasionally sawdust in the air. I'm obviously not going to be machining wood, I'm just wondering whether its a "don't run the mill when there's woodwork going on in the shop", "don't run the mill when there's woodwork in the shop and make sure you carefully clean it before starting again", "cover the mill with plastic before doing woodwork so the dust is kept out fully", or "this is a bad idea find a different space".