Hey Guys,

Thanks for all the great replies. It seems this mill will work just fine for my needs. My current parts are made from custom extrusions I designed and all are roughly 1.5" x 1.5". However, i will likely design a few billet items once I have a mill. When I looked at the mill a while back, he showed me how he used it. He does his edge finding with an electronic edge finder he made. He places it in the spindle and I believe the machine slowly drives into the part until continuity is made then it adds an offset of 1/2 the diameter of the tool. Seems integrated in mach3. I am sure you all know what this is, but wanted to mention that he has it set up that way. For z height tool setting, he uses a similar device and touches the tool to a puck he places on the part or the datum of the table. I think he would touch off with each tool change since he was not using the mach 3 offsets.

In regards to the MAD drawbar, since it relies on the spindle being moved to compress the bellville washers once the tool is inserted, will it return to a repeatable position? Would I need to lock the quill after the tool change?

In regards to the TTS system, thanks for the tip that I can buy the granite separately and height gauge and collets on Ebay.

My only other question is in my design, I have a #6-32 that I need to make sure I don't tap thru. It does not need to be at any tight tollerance, but +/- .03 would be fine in depth. Without rigid tapping what are my options? Can I use a speedy tap or the tormach equivalent with a stop collar on the tap?

Thanks again for all the great advice its helping me make the decision to jump into this a bit easier. Oh about me, I am a mechanical design engineer using solidworks since version 98. Spent most of my career in designing capitol equipment for metrology and extreme precision fab and R&D. Switched tot the film industry and was the lead design engineer for RED digital Cinema designing most of their prototype products in a skunkworks type environment. Now Im in the VR gaming arena and I also have my own product I patented to attach GoPros to aircraft wingstruts. I want to buy this machine to fab my GoPro designs and also some light fab for an airplane i am building.

Marc