Member postings for Daryl Adams

Which mill ?

Firstly decide what metals you wish to mill or will ever need to, if your planning to mill stainless or a similarly hard metal where a good degree of milling is needed then obviously a small bench mill with a Jacobs chuck is not going to be up to the job. If your planning a good degree of milling then at least one power feed to the table should be considered essential along with digital readouts. One very good piece of advice is 'try before you buy', although this may not be practicable in reality one should at least have a look for the model milling on youtube, I recently watched a medium sized mill which looked fairly sturdy on paper but when I saw it on youtube attempting to drill a 1" hole in plate steel, it looked like it wasn't up to the job and the whole machine looked like it was wishing to have a wander about the room.

There are some good old second hand models available and 'new is not necessarily better', especially if parts for the older model are still made and catered for or can be sourced second hand. Most mills do not use morse taper tooling, therefore if the mill your planning on has MT then you will be slightly more limited to which tools you can use. For example, there are lots of second hand Clarkson type mill cutters (threaded shank) available in both new and used and often imperial sizes can be picked up cheaper than metric ones, then there is availability, the United States is all imperial so less frequent imperial sizes can always be sourced , So it's a good idea to choose the spindle type that offers the most available choices for tooling and is relatively easy to change. Common spindles like R8 or Int 30/40 all offer conversion to each other except to MT.

The Clarke CLM500 drawbar is 12mm x 1.5mm pitch, the compound slide appears to be also 12mm, although 2mm pitch and is of course is a left hand thread on the compound. Both the mill and tailstock are morse taper 3. Don't forget to note the circular ring on the bottom of the mill head which when turned lifts the whole mill - for those like me that rarely study manuals!