Thinking of jumping into CNC milling. How to start ?

[SparkyLabs]

OK. Well I'm still not sure which way to go and had a good chat with jazzcnc this morning which was most helpful. I think if I put DRO's on my current manual mill it will make it useable for prototyping while I learn more about machining and CNC and save up and then buy something decent if it makes sense for light manufacturing.

Sent from my phone so mind the autocorrect.

[magicniner]

Longer spent evaluating and planning is rarely lost time.
There's a huge range of things that a decent DRO with multiple zeros renders relatively simple on a manual mill.

[SparkyLabs]

Well my whole looking into a CNC mill started with my frustration over the manual machine I use. I looked at DRO's but it became apparent that for some you can start spending hundreds of pounds although I'm a bit confused about the claims of you been able to cut an arc or circle with one of these, typically the ones on eBay have this claim.

So I didn't want to spend lots of money on the current machine knowing that I will outgrow it and started looking at just getting a CNC. A work colleague found me the proxxon unit however this has turned out to be a bit of a Schrodinger's cat as while the mill exists or apparently exists I will never know if the CNC version exists until I try to order one and see if it actually turns up. My first attempt at getting a quote got me a quote for a manual machine twice in fact this happened. And from this discussion it is clear that there is far more to this than I had realised so I should probably learn about what the hell I am doing and the equipment before buying something that turns out to be no good. I can only but spend the money once.