a pic of my new (to me) mill

[Alguy]

This is a bencmaster vertical i got this summer with a shop made stand made of angle iron. the quill is fixed and the it uses mt 2 collets with a home made drawbar, i know i need some tooling for such as endmills and a vise, i am considering the 3 inch offered by the little machine shop, and asking for endmill recomndations .
i cleaned it up and painted it with the silver hammertone paint. i thought i should have aleast one shiny thing in my basement shop.
i took the pic after i run it bit.
http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h4...0/01cbd9b8.jpg

[rockrat]

Thats a perfect size for a fellow. You can get it into the basment without alot of effort. As for the 3" vise from the Little Machine Shop, I bought one and I am very happy with it. There is a post I made covering what I found upon inspection floating around here somewhere.

Show us your first project with it. I'm curious.

rock-

[SGW]

Looks nice! When I read in your post that you'd used silver hammertone paint I had my doubts, but I think I looks really good.

As far as endmills: I think that depends a bit on your level of experience. If you're just starting out, you will whack a few endmills learning how to use them, so you may as well get the "quality import" jobs. They aren't bad, and you won't feel quite as PO'd when you whack a $5 endmill instead of a $15 endmill.

After you've been at it a while though, I think you'll find that you will appreciate the quality of "name brand" endmills, and you'll know how to treat them so they last long enough to make the extra cost worthwhile. I tend to use Niagara, from Travers Tool www.travers.com but Putnam, Weldon, Brubaker, etc. are all good.
I think Travers tends to be a little cheaper than MSC www.mscdirect.com

[sidegrinder]

Neat little mill, alguy. Lack of quill travel probably won't be too big of a deal, as the knee on that shouldn't be very hard to crank. Nice size for a home shop, easy to move about. If your just starting out it would be better to get some enco/import endmills to mess with. Just my opinion though!

[CCWKen]

Cool! Fits nice next to that Craftsman lathe too.

[Wareagle]

Nice looking machine. Good job on cleaning it up.

On the end mill front, I found a set of the 'quality imports' that were on sale. As I have used them up, I have replaced them with the good old American made EMs. I broke a few of the imports by just not paying attention to what I was doing, misfiguring, or a bad set-up (your typical newbie learning curve). It sure didn't hurt as bad in using the imports as the canon fodder, either pride wise or financially!

[gzig5]

Cool! Fits nice next to that Craftsman lathe too.

Ken, I do believe that is a South Bend lathe. See the S in the black area on the quickchange. If it is a Craftsman the gaurds and controls are a lot different than mine.

BTW, Neat little mill!

[Alguy]

gzig has the good eyes it is a southbend 9 in in the pic. this morning i was making some t slot nuts using a 1/2 4 flute end mil and made cut ,250 deep and .150 on each side , i really dont know what i am doing yet but it seemed
ok with that , but i belive that is all it can do in mild steel.

[JCHannum]

The Benchmaster is a good machine, and a perfect complement to the South Bend lathe. Rudy Kouhoupt used a Benchmaster in many of his projects.

I also had one for several years and made many projects on it. The only word of caution is the MT#2 collets lack the holding power of other systems, and you have to keep a close eye on the milling cutter as it may have a tendency to pull out on heavy cuts.

[john hobdeclipe]

With the lathe and the mill, there's much fun to be had.