Nigel and the Milling Machine
Buying | Unboxing | DRO install | First tests

Yes, horrible, I know. Why a mill?

Well here I am, with three years of metalworking lathe ownership behind me (see) and I'm craving for yet another machine tool fix. I've gotta have a milling machine.

I will admit that it's an unreasonable desire, I've tried to control it. To try and get round it I assembled an adjustable table next to my pillar drill so I could spin a milling cutter and move the work piece but it was a cheap drill to begin with and the slop at the end of the tool was horrific. As each new job came up I floundered around coming up with more and more extreme 'fixes'. It isn't that I had to have a proper vertical mill for any of these jobs I wanted to do but more to stop me going mad. I tried, I hit obstacles and upgrading the drill any more to fix them would be throwing money at the symptoms and not the problem so it just had to be a mill. It had to be a solid, heavy, rigid, precise and dependable mill. And anyway, I knew deep down that I really deserved it.

Well a peruse of the web showed me 'toy' mills for a few hundred but although they might make lovely, delicate modelling items my lathe gets called upon to make bigger and bigger parts every few months so deliberately limiting things to tiny before I even started felt a bit silly. However I am rather, well very, restricted on head room and the door size for getting things into my workshop so there are strict maximum limits on some things.

Then there is the question of what gets moved out so the mill gets to fit in? Let's admit it: I'm rather volume challenged here too. I think the freezer with the 'bird food' in it (Chicks, pigeons and rabbit, you don't feed a raptor on birdseed) could go somewhere else but that still only gives me a restricted width between things that aren't negotiable and 172cms of headspace. Perhaps the drill just goes and gives up it's space.

Then there is the question of weight. Demanding rigidity means committing to bulk iron and I'm no youngster any more. The winch I bought to move the lathe about can be pressed back into service again but the clearance above is a problem. Mills are tall while lathes are conveniently low and flat.

So what is the requirement spec? What do I actually want to do with it?
Most things that have been made on my DIY mill have been plates with precise holes and slots. Also boring holes that are bigger than any drill. I have bodged up things in the lathe's four-jaw chuck to do jobs like that.

Cut from the catalogue. Buying

So I looked in all the usual places, that's online shops as I don't feel I have the savvy to buy second hand. I guess it is going to be a Chinese build so pick an importer I feel safe with and go as far up the price range as I can afford allowing for my size et al restrictions.

So this is where I ended up. It's a Champion 16VS Turret Mill.
The same thing appears to be badged by several people but my lathe came from Chester Hobby Store and they seemed to know what they are doing, at least they were up to my brother's standards.

I ordered a 3 axis DRO from MACHINE-DRO so it is from the same stable as the one on the lathe. The supplier does an install kit for the Champion 16V so fitting it may be a pain but that reduces it a lot. The scales are 5 micron (0.005mm) resolution so way better than affordable tooling. The nice thing about DRO is that it measures 'after' the lead screw slop so provided you are careful you can cut more accurately than you deserve. Both orders were placed on Saturday which probably counts as Monday in shipping terms. Such is life.

Worries.

Thankfully both key suppliers listed their items as 'in stock' so I hoped I wouldn't be waiting around forever. I fear I might be in for another drill-and-tap install process on the DRO and I'm not looking forward to that but it's inside my skill-set. The 16VS illustrations show a display on the tool head so with the DRO is on the back I end up with a four axis system if I want to incline the head.

So, with the mill and the DRO ordered, I started looking at my current tooling. OK obvious snag number one: my nice ER32 collet holder does not have a drawbar thread so it won't be happy being used vertically. <sigh> Add one of them to the shopping list so I can use my collets. Ditto my face mill arbour but that has an M3 taper so it was always a no-go. Also I ordered a low flat 100mm vice to bolt onto the bed and retrieved the taller vice from the lathe-milling attachment. I have a bunch of endmills so at least I can play once it comes. The impression I get from watching milling videos is that 90% of the really clever tricks are in the clamping of the item. Once the work piece is solidly in the right position actually cutting it is fairly straightforward (well... from a lathe users perspective).
Fresh from the crate. Unboxing

When Wednesday, delivery day, came I blew up the trolley tyres and parked it in the hall so I could try and get the crate unloaded straight onto that and waited hopefully. Yes, there was glitch when the driver had been given the wrong house number but once we solved that he helpfully cut the crate free of its pallet and we got it onto the trolley.
I dragged it round the back lane, up the garden path, moved the motorbike out of the workshop to move the crate past it. Once I had the crate apart I took it's picture then rigged the hoist as although it is not to heavy to move about it is way to much for a dead-lift from the floor. With that I put it on my older workmate and inspected it.

Well the manual in the box is, to be charitable, for a previous version and, frankly, it is a waste of space anyway. Pages and pages of 'Health and Safety theatre' followed by almost no actual 'operating' information. I worked my way through the controls, discovered how to access the 'draw in' screw and such pretty much by myself.

The basic table feeds feel good and I'd be surprised if there is much backlash. The vertical hand wheel on the top also has good feel but it's pretty heavy when winding upwards. However the drill style vertical control on the quill does not give the same impression and the built in display gives little confidence and is rather faint despite a battery swap. I must wait on the DRO to confirm my impressions. However for serious milling the quill would not be extended so that may be only relevant for drilling or incline head milling.

I confess I'm also not impressed by the method of inclining the head. Two bolts with limited access need to be loosened to free it up and then you manhandle it to the right angle and tighten them back up. There is a scale but the whole system will be rather top heavy and fighting you. If/when I need this feature I must come up with tricks to facilitate this.

Conversely, compared with my drill based botch it is absolutely wonderful and incidentally matches the picture above that I stole from their web site far better than it does the site's descriptive text.

So I wound the table fully left and right, measured the overhangs and marked up the bench to drill it for the hold-down bolts. Thankfully the holes that retained the previous system are going to be covered by the supplied oil tray. Then, as an after thought, I checked the light fitting above and revised the position forward another 8cms so the motor housing clears that at full Z. Such are low ceilings.

One concern is lack of vertical clearance. I put a 12mm drill in the chuck and even with the Z wound fully up it was only 5cms above the table. I think the old pillar drill will have to find a new space to perform such operations.

I am also somewhat annoyed to discover that the vertical travel is restricted by the rather nice three lever quill control drill style 'wheel'. Thankfully the arms unscrew so I suspect that at least one is going to live a lot of its duty in the milling/lathe tools draw. Sad really.

Oh and I confess I removed that plastic chip guard. If it aligned with the rest of the system it might have survived longer but it sagged at about 10° off horizontal and looked as sloppy as it was.

Since the DRO hadn't come yet I started looking at the mill sitting on the workmate and wondering what improvements it might need. The one that stood out most was that handle on the top to adjust the Z position. It was stiff and not conducive to long travels plus when it was installed in its intended place it would be less accessible too. Winding the bed left and right sucked too so power-feeds, if not full CNC, look like they will make things more useable and might be quite fun to engineer. After all, as I now have a lathe and a mill, I can obviously make anything 8).

Then on the Friday, in response to my email, I was told that 'IN STOCK' on the website actually meant "we haven't made all the parts yet". So the DRO install is on hold for a bit. <sigh>
The prediction was for it to be shipping on the Monday but when they got the part they sent it all on next-day rather than the 3-5 days I paid for so thank you. Also they sent me the installation instructions by email so I could sort that out ahead of time. (I just needed M4/M5 drills and taps, callipers and gauges so nothing I had to shop for.)

Installing the DRO kit

It came. OK this was as fraught as I expected but I spread it over several days to keep the cardiac stress levels down. I never seem to have much luck with kits like these. Their packing labels and numbering scheme are a bit esoteric. They expect me to magic up shims but I could get close enough. Some of the supplied bolts were just plain wrong and others were short packed but I have Amazon on next day but that is still time lost. Conversely my Asperger's makes me a compulsive measurer/re-measurer and more than picky about accuracy and style (tapping cast iron horizontally while on your knees on the floor is an artform not a learnt skill).

The supplied cables are also very long (3.5m) and the nice metallic sleeves would make altering them a bit fraught. Getting all this tidy is going to take more than a bunch of P-clips and some zip ties.

Then I discovered that the
display
had a missing bottom left vertical segment on one of the digits so a six looks like a five. I emailed their support address and they sent me a returns number. I finished the assembly and test then sent it back on RM's 'next day by 1pm signed for' and waited. Tracking tells me it arrived on the Monday at 10:17 so I sent an enquiry email on Thursday. They responded:
"Thank you for your request; at this stage, the item will be looked at for repair."
This, I confess, worried me. It is, after all, new equipment that has arrived defective. I'm happy with a repair but not with going in the 'repair when we get round to it' queue.
A week later, on Thursday again, I enquired asking when I could expect a fix or a replacement.
On Friday they said it had been 'escalated' and they would request the engineer to 'prioritise your return'. Good. Then, later in the day, they emailed again to say it was on DPD for Monday. Even better.
And then it arrived on the Saturday before 1100am. I was pleased, reinstalled it and checked it out. The DRO range is X: 308 Y: 128 and Z: 206mm.

However I do like it. The raw convenience of zeroing off a tool against the work piece and then winding on an exact amount of movement is definitely worth all the agro and labour. Plus having somebody else supply a kit of parts to fit it that are reasonable, even if not quite the way I would do it, saves ages. To do it all myself I would definitely need a mill with a DRO to make the bits on.

First tests

Right. I've got the bits. I've done enough prep. It's time to cut some actual metal....
So I bolt the vice onto the bed and clamp in an old piece of scrap box section.
I elect to use the E32 collet holder with a 10mm collet and a 10mm HSS flute mill.

A few things show up to fix before I can start. First find the Allen screw that stops the power/speed controller box from waving about and tighten that up so the buttons don't run away from my fingers. Then add a 36mm spanner to the 'mill' tool box as I don't have a quill lock and the collet holder just rotates as I try to tighten things up. Discover that the forward/reverse switch needs to be set to the right to rotate in the 'normal' direction. It is apparently a reverse/forward switch. This is also the point where I discovered that the bed needed an M8 clamping set. Shopping time again. <sigh> but it came quickly even though the M8 set to match my M10 was not in stock most places.

Finally touch off and zero the DRO, then make two very timorous and rather slow 1mm deep 15mm long passes as I haven't actually set up and used a mill since about 1967 and never unsupervised.
That should give me a 2mm deep slot. Well the callipers read me as within 0.06mm of what I dialled up on the DRO for depth and length and that's probably down to a first go at touch off on a mill on a rather uneven workpiece.

Frankly that's a relief. Now I can make something real.
What? The bits to CNC it obviously.

For the arcane and weird voyage of discovery that is installing a CNC system on it see here.


By Nigel Hewitt