[kaliken]

To add to the discussion.

Yes, buying a nice knee mill is good and likely a great option if given the chance. 294 has been extremely lucky that our main sponsor Northrop-Grumman has donated a couple of old Bridgeport knee mills for our shop.

However, I totally hear the things that need to fit in the shop. While our build area was under renovation in 2013 we were displaced into a portable classroom. Realizing we have lost our machining resources and we didn't want to use up all our sponsors time to make tons of brackets or spacers, we purchased a mini-mill and lathe. Namely a G0704 and an Micro-Mark 7x16 lathe.

For all the crap people spout on them, they were a godsend to our team.

Now I will be honest, the lathe turned out to be more of a dud. The tail stock was poorly designed and couldn't maintain alignment even after being trammed. We had to do a lot of adjusting to get the lathe up and running. The mill was absolutely great. Are you going to cut giant pieces while maintaining 1 thou tolerances. no. could you cut simple brackets with semi- tight tolerance holes? actually yes; even without a DRO (we actually taught kids about backlash and how to compensate) you could machine some pretty decent things.

But the biggest thing, was that these little machines turned out to be super student friendly and turned into major workhorses during out 2013 build season. We would have never survived without them and I feel that getting one is not a bad idea. The big caveat is that you need to give them a little bit of TLC. Spend the time disassembling, tramming and dialing things in. Just like you need to do on any machine, a little will take these machines a long way.

Also.. to make things even more interesting. Once we moved back into our normal build space, we decided to convert our G0704 to a CNC. With a little help with the home machinist community and the huge amount of online resources we successfully turned out a pretty nice little CNC machine. Obviously its not a HAAS VF2, but it seriously churned out every bracket, gusset plate and heck even our custom 3CIM gearboxes. Heck it got just as much use as our standard Bridgeport machines. Not too shabby for such a small mill.