hi there people! a friend of mine recently contacted me to let me know that he might have some work for me doing prototype part and some drilling jig for the place he work for most of them a small work envelope job around 2"x4"x6" and since the are all job made of aluminium, mild steel and brass it wont require a big heavy duty machine, the place where i am not sure the small machine i am looking at would be deficient are in the precision departement, for example piece would need to be parallele inside 0.002" with some hole with tight precision of 0.0001" on the diameter, the general tolerance chart the use is the following
x.xx = +/- 0.005"
x.xxx = +/- 0.0001"

so my question is the following, since the SX3 is less costfull and offer a smaller work envelope but still is able to make part inside the work envelope i need i was wondering if with some fine tuning the tormach and syil are comparable precision wise? i know those two machine may have hard time holding precision of 0.0001" but these tolerance is only on hole diameter the positioning and dimension tolerance are mostly around +/- 0.002" and in some rare case slightly smaller around +/- 0.0015"
now why i am looking at if the sx3 would be capable of such precision is that since it would cost me less i could invest in a better boring head and tooling for it, also the the ipm feeding is of secondary importance for me as most most of the job i would have to do are like 2 or 3 small simple part but with slightly tight tolerance as stipulated before but most if not all the time i would have around 2 day to produce them the same goes for depth of cut since there would be no need for depth of cut in most situation over 0.05"

so what do you think? now this would only be in the short run if all goes well and they are satisfyed of my work the work load may grow and at that point i would plan on buying a bigger machine with faster capacity and would keep the small machine for what it is done for small job?