I am a shop teacher and a FIRST coach. After HS i went to a 2 year college for machining. I have used Bridgeports (industry standard). for many years. we are receiving $4000 to get some NEW equipment. we have a sharp lathe and now i want a knee mill. don’t need a DRO right now and i don’t want a table top. Bridgeport’s to expensive. Jet, Bolton , enco, acer e-mill, birmingham
if anyone has experience with these brands good or bad any advice would be helpful
The Bolton looks like a better buy with the unique universal table, DRO, and power feed, but the Brimingham seems to follow the more traditional design. It can also go to a much higher speed, whereas the Bolton caps out at 2190rpm. I have only used Bridgeports and some cheap tabletop ones though, so I can’t comment on those specific machines.
The DRO is really handy for students; working with dials, especially when working on a lot of holes, is not fun. Even if *you *don’t need one, the students will thank you. 
Are you factoring in tooling costs in the $5000?
Eventually I do want to DRO that could be bought later. I have some money for tooling that will come out of a different funding stream.
The penn tool co version looks like a direct copy of a bridgeport. I woul go with thst one. It doesnt look like you can tram the head on the bolton a major drawback of doing a bunch of angles. I would look at some of the home machinist forums.
I’ve found virtually all of the Chinese copies of Bridgeports to be perfectly fine. Even JET, which I overall hate. we have a JET JTM-1 (or something like that) and it works perfectly fine after more than 10 years. No issues with it at all. However it is the pulley head and not the variable head, so there’s a lot less to break there.
It’s interesting that this is the case, because most all of those same companies’ cheap lathes are total garbage.
This looks like a good one for the price
WOW, I know you hate most Chinese made machines so this is saying a lot. I guess it is harder to mess up such an old and tested design that the Bridgeport represents. I know I definitely have a distaste in general for Jet, Grizzly, and similar “branded designs” where they just slap a company sticker and paint job on a machine. I guess it makes sense that some of them are worth a good look as a machine to add to one’s shop.
One thing you can do to “fix” some of the speed issues with using a pulley head is to stick a Variable Frequency Drive on you machine so you can adjust the speed of the mill by altering the AC frequency(letting you run faster or slower than normally capable). I’ve heard(haven’t looked into it much) you can fine VFD’s for around $200 these days.
I’ve never found a problem using any Bridgeport clones, (Chinese or otherwise) oddly enough I’ve used and was offered to buy a “FIRST” Milling machine (long shang machinery co. ) I don’t think you can go wrong with any of them of course with a little bit of knowledge and research on the companies. You should figure out what table travel size you want to work with. E.g. I have a Spanish Anayak FV-2 works fine all they way from the 70s
Things you would consider otherwise and have been mentioned before would be a DRO (I know you mentioned you didn’t want one right now but its definitely worth getting), VFD/Variable Pulley , customer support (You might not have time during build season for example to fix a broken mill but I assume you can find a millwright or similar tho), “Oneshot” oil, size of machine taper (R8 works great for me and is cheap maybe look at retro fitting a TTS setup for the hell of it), Horsepower (2HP+) and RPM range (0-4500) (these two depending on what tool you want to run cuts you want to do of course)
Probably out of your price range but have you looked into any CNC machines (Tormach or etc). (I don’t know theres some sort of education/STEM related discount) but this can save money/time on buy e.g. a turntable/indexer etc.
If your budgeting/purchasing department allows (or if thats you) try looking at “used” machines I know of some machine/job shops moving/closing who had some very new machines they couldn’t move or were moving to a new machine suddenly. (e.g. started getting into alot of CNC machines) And you can get quite a reduction in price when buying used. (E.G. a nice Bed mill was going for 3-4K when it retained for about 33K…) Results may vary.
I was really tempted offer to buy just the “FIRST” badge off the machine haha.
We may be in the market for a knee mill soon, so I wanted to bring this thread back to life. Does anyone have any further recommendations or reviews for knee mills? I’m particularly looking for ones above $5k.
We ended up getting this one http://www.grizzly.com/products/9-X-49-Vertical-Mill-with-Power-Feed-and-DRO/G0796?utm_campaign=zPage
We like it a lot. No problems so far. It has a nice DRO and power feed. Power down quill is nice for boring. If you have the money get a Bridgeport. They are the best manual mill on the market and what everyone else tries to copy. But they are probably twice the price.
Are you looking for new or used? If I were you, I would look at a used Bridgeport. With your budget, you could probably get a machine in really good shape and have enough left over to buy tooling, vise, DRO, etc.
I mean you could always go for a brand new Bridgeport Series 1 http://www.hardingeus.com/ProductCatalog/Product/ProductId/56
It will run you around 16k but, the machine will probably outlive all of us.
Looks like a good price for the specs and features. Do you have any high-res and/or closeup photos of different parts of the machine?
Fixed that for ya
1678 runs 4 standard Bridgeports, 2 from the early 70’s, 2 from the late 60’s. Over 180 years of service and they could still be rebuilt and go another 40 years each.
I sure can get some. What would you like to see in particular?
Pictures of the ways would be great if you have any.
It has box ways. But is seems smooth and tight so far. Granted we don’t have many hours on it yet. I will get some pictures this week