Hello,
My long term goal of acquiring a more serious CNC mill for my team is inching closer to completion.
We currently own and operate the
Degem TP-MI, which is a basic CNC mill mostly suitable for milling plastics.
We are looking of moving upwards towards a more serious mill, and have been offered a very nice table top mill, similar to
this model, with a DRO,
with all the tooling required for a total of about $3750.
However this is a manual mill and I'm pretty sure I would like to have a CNC mill.
So I sniffed around online, and came across
www.microproto.com, which sell two models of CNC mills:
The MicroMill 2000
The MicroMill DSLS 3000
both have the following in their product page:
Quote:
|
A full desktop machining system with capabilities to produce most anything from very simple to very complex geometric forms in wood, plastic, aluminum or steel.
|
This will not come with the tooling, so I looked at
this thread and i'll use the ball park estimate of $350 for tooling.
Since we are on a budget, and sneaking a CNC mill under the noses of the budget people is hard enough as it is, I was leaning towards the cheaper of the two above links, i.e. the "MicroMill 2000" (it seems to be no less powerful than it's big brother), and which costs $2295.
so that's a total of about $2650, not including the shipping (
To Israel), and the taxes we might have to pay for it (taxes can be 25%-50% so that's about another $1000).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
So after that long winded introduction into the situation, here are some questions i'd like help with:
- Am I making a blatant error in dismissing the manual mill? stories about people never using CNC mills to their full potential?
- will the "MicroMill"s really be able to machine aluminum efficiently? what about steel? (they claim to be able to, but perhaps the claims are exaggerated?)
- Do you know of any other similar CNC mills?
- Any other thoughts about all this? stuff to look out for?
I really appreciate your help in this matter, the ChiefDelphi community is my main consultant in these matters.
Thanks!
-Leav