What is the Total Cost of Conversion (Excluding the Mill)

[Monty_UK]

Well in that case I would look long and hard before buying a Mini mill because very few will have the RPM you need for cutting aluminium and soft materials correctly and converting the spindle is not a simple or cheap thing to do.

If you want a challenge you may be better off DIY building a strong Fixed gantry Router/Mill that will do everything you need and then some with the correct spindle fitted. It will certainly be more versatile and useful than a converted Minimill and won't cost much more. Here's one I built a few years ago (yellow one) with a 500 x 500 cut area and also one we built recently that is fully covered designed exclusively for cutting Aluminium moulds with a cut area of 600 x 400 which is more or equal to many industrial CNC machines but fits in a 1mtr/2 space.!

The blue one looks very impressive - do you know the build cost of that ?

[JAZZCNC]

The blue one looks very impressive - do you know the build cost of that ?

Yes, I do but that's not information I'm going to share on the forum unfortunately as these machines we build to sell, plus we buy components in bulk so wouldn't be relative to the average DIY builder.
However, for the machine in the picture you won't get any change from £10k given it's got a custom-built 40K spindle with ceramic bearings. But what I will say is that from the point of view of a machine builder the bulk of the cost isn't components but rather the time that goes into machining and building the machine. There are a lot of hours and work that goes into a machine like this which as a DIY builder doesn't come into play.