We have cash to burn...or do we?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Kdabr

We already have a pretty nice shop, but were considering purchasing a CNC mill. What are your thoughts on that?

What do you have in the shop? If you've got a drill press and a lathe and/or a manual mill, you probably don't need a CNC mill. Besides the cost of the mill, you also have to consider tooling, which eats up a lot of the budget pretty quickly. There's a couple threads about stocking a shop with $X, I think it's $10K and $1K, that I'd look at.

OTOH, if you don't have any form of mill/drill press/lathe, I'd get a reasonably nice manual mill and tooling. You can use a mill as a drill press, but using a drill press as a mill is not repeat not recommended. (Use of a drill press as a light lathe may be possible, but also not recommended. With a mill, you'd be more able to get away with that.)