Same old quandry

Hello all,

My name is mark and I am an alcoholic.....sorry wrong forum

I have been using a using a 6040 router for some time now and after some modifications it works ok for plastics and wood etc. I have started to mess around with brass and alu which leads me to the big question of the day.

I want to buy a milling machine and upgrade to CNC and was hoping the fine folks on here could help me out a bit.

1. Working space is limited to about 1.5m long by 800mm wide.

2. Weight limit is aroung 200kg as will be used in a shed.

3. Ideally belt drive (as motor/pulley will be upgraded to run at =/- 7000rpm)

4. Ideally R8 taper

5. needs verticle travel that can accomodate milling 100mm tall parts.

6. Budget is around £1.5k

7. Working with brass, alu, and ocassionally SS

I have looked at AMAT25LV from amadeal, Sieg SX2.7/SX3, Warco WM16B, Chester Champion 20V amongst others and have gone trough the specs but they can only tell you so much regarding rigidity/chatter I will be bolting down to a descent table and probably bracing the column to a brick wall.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Mark

I can recommend a Denford Novamill if you can find one - designed for CNC, rigid, quite compact (though limited working area). Quite old electronics but can be upgraded by using one of the Chinese self-contained CNC controllers as recommended on here by the lamented John Stevenson; or you could build up your own controller from modules and an old PC for 200 - 300 squids. Int30 taper spindle though it's rumoured that there are some R8 ones around. The original steppers are fine though some people have upgraded.

If you want something a bit larger the Denford Triac seems well regarded.

There have been series in MEW describing conversion of an SX3 to CNC (by Dick Stephen?).

With CNC you will probably not be taking such heavy cuts but many more of them at higher spindle speed so rigidity may not be so much or an issue.

Thanks for the information John, I'm sure i have seen the denford's knocking around on eBay, will have a look at them as well as the triac's. I was looking at the sx3's so will have to check out that article. I think I saw that sieg do checks on their machines before they go out, presumably warco do too but not sure about amadeal and Chester.

If you look around on the net there is an article describing cnc'ing an SX3, might be helpful.

Emgee

The Dick Stephen articles are about an X3 though X & Y will be the same as an SX3.

SX2.7 would be very easy to increase the speed on simply by changing pulley sizes on the direct drive but you are unlikely to find a second hand one and new price blows most of your budget or was that just for the base machine to convert? You may also need to think about better spec bearings at those sort of speeds, the KX3 for example has much more expensive matched bearings than the X3 and SX3 mills.

Actually Dick Stephen's series is on the Arc site:

**LINK**

Thanks emgee, John, and Jason. The x3 conversion will make for some light reading tonight I'm sure 😉. 1.5k was the base budget Jason, cnc upgrades will be done in bits and drabs over the coming months. The 2.7 would be my preference but I honestly couldn't tell you why however knowing that it would be an easy from upgrade is great, how are sieg machines rated quality wise compared to their counterparts from the likes of amadeal, Chester, and warco?

As said just the pulleys to alter and less weight in the head as there is no gearbox. You would loose some torque at slow speeds but as you are unlikely to be running big diameter cutters it won't be a problem.

I may be a bit bias but the Sieg stuff I have has been OK, X3 is 12yrs old and done a lot of work, SX2.7 only had a small amount of use as a part of the series I write for the Mag and the KX3 CNC I've only had for 6 months but pleased with what it has done so far.

Only have a Warco lathe which has been fine over the last 10yrs so no experience with their mills or anything from the others but we probably get less posts about problems with Sieg machines from ARC than we do from the others.

Kx3 looks like a beast, just watching sieg video's now. That's good to hear about the lack of issues they have, just looking at the work envelope now. Might pop up arc at some point to have a look at them in the flesh.

Narrowed down now between the amadeal amat25lv and the sieg x2.7/x3. Had a look to find the issue of mew 241 (I think) for the amat25lv review but they only go back to 270something in the backside section, is there anywhere I can find this issue at all?

Mark, just a heads up you said your preference was for a R8 spindle, the Amat 25 is a 3MT spindle, just thought I would point it out in case you had missed it.

Ron, only the short table version is MT3 the others have an R8 option.

Thanks Tricky, my mistake didnt realise that.

Yes I saw the 2 versions Ron but thanks for looking out 👍

Just to finish this post off, I opted for a Weiss VM32LV from Amadeal in the end. Biggest machine i could use for where it is going to go. Arriving tuesday and to say i'm excited is an understatement, thank you for all your help.

Mark

The width is tight, I would look at the ARC site, I believe they give the dimensions and some of their fairly small mills have the preferred R8 taper.

The SX2P uses up 845mm width and only runs to 2500 rpm, but has R8. You have to factor in the full movement of the bed X axis when calculating the footprint. 

I missed your last post, good luck with the new mill.

Edited By old mart on 14/12/2019 22:41:07

Edited By old mart on 14/12/2019 22:42:38

Cheers Mart