Hobby milling machines now in stock - Perfect for conversions

[Neale]

Yes, that was me - casual visitors looked at the 3D printer, and anyone with a model engineering background had a chat about the spark eroder. A group of club members are currently working on a wire EDM machine on a similar small scale.

I built the Prusa which gave me a taste for CNC so I built a quick-and-dirty CNC router (JGRO design, all MDF). Had a lot of fun with that and did some useful work as well but it taught me enough that the mk2, currently about 90% complete, needed a lot more attention to some critical areas (while trying not to overbuild). When I get round to mk2 printer I shall take a similar approach, although the technology has moved on a lot.

Coming back, vaguely, to the original topic, I built a small vertical mill from a part-machined kit many years ago, and it's still in use. However, it now sits alongside a Chinese vertical mill which, in real terms, probably cost rather less than the original kit for significantly more capacity. The kind of machine shown in this thread represents how much easier it is now to get decent machining capacity at home than it used to be, even for a build-it-if-you-can dinosaur like me.

[komatias]

Neale,

since you saw my machines at the BSMEE, could you share your honest thoughts :D

[Neale]

since you saw my machines at the BSMEE, could you share your honest thoughts :D

Happy to do so, but my memory has more holes than a vacuum table...

When I saw Emvio at the show, it rang a bell but I didn't associate it with anything that I'd seen on this forum or I would have said hello. I do remember that the stand always seemed fairly busy - don't know how that translates into real business, but you seemed popular!

The couple of things that I do remember were the quality of the prints produced, and the quality of the machine build. Now, I'm coming from a pretty low level when it comes to print quality on my own machine, but I would be very happy with the quality of output of your printers. My reaction to looking at construction and quality of build was that it went rather further than I would have expected in a 3D printer, especially bearing in mind that fused-filament is probably the least good of all the 3D print technologies, but it was a bit further up the curve of diminishing returns than I might have expected. However, I am a bit out of touch with the current crop of commercially-produced machines so bear that in mind when you read this.

One of my own background projects is to build a spark eroder. I have already built the basic structure using some prints from my 3D printer and it's waiting for me to build the electronics now. One specific project is to use it to make extruder nozzles, to get finer holes than I can drill, and it would allow me to make them from stainless as well. Ready-made extruders? Bah, humbug!