Smithy or other Benchtop Mills/Lathes/CNC

[Doug G]

Interesting you mention Smithy and Microkinetics. In Fall of 2003, I was granted an opportunity to spend $5000 in "school supplies" in about 1 day. We didn't have any mill or lathe (nor machining experience), so I found the Smithy in the MSCDirect catalog and said, hmm... looks like the all-in-one would do the trick. Well, we still use it today, but there is something to be said about, you get what you pay for. For most of simple milling work - its great, stick the DRO on it, lock down your table axis and mill some mounting holes or slots. Cory mentioned one important aspect, as soon as you raise the "neck", you lose your zero. A big pain when you change out a drill bit/ chuck for a collet/endmill. But you learn it's capabilities. I've been the most dissappointed with the lathe function. It is extremely hard to center the chuck and tailstock. Even when we have a professional machinist (retired) do it, the best they could do it +/- 0.003" which is unacceptable for small gear work. We pretty much just use it as a Mill/Drill only.

That same year, we had another administrator say that we could spend another $5000 on "supplies" (I've been fortunate to have a great district administration looking out for us) so I said let's see if we can get a small CNC to help build some small gear boxes, mounting plates and such. So we found the benchtop CNC mill by microkinetics. It may be different than the one you're referring to, but we've been pleased with it, it's just really slow, we usually only cut 0.05" at a pass through aluminum, and the Z-axis stepper motor is too weak to plunge cut most of the time, so we manually plunge the starting hole when needed, and then allow it to cut.

This year we got a CNC Jr. from CNCMasters - and so far it is worked out great, but we should have spent the extra money on the 220V Variable spindle speed option. We also found out that you must isolate your machines if you work in a tiny building like we do. We had our CNC Jr and Smithy both going at the same time and tripped the breaker and upon flipping the breaker back on, the CNC Jr. Contoller board fried. But CNC masters had it replaced within a week for $110 - critical because it was during January.

Hope this info was helpful.