[peteeng]

Hi Jack - Very nice build! Peter

[joeavaerage]

Hi Jack,
I agree with Peter, very good looking build. I can well imagine it would do aluminum very nicely.

It was my first build and certainly far from perfect.

That is very much the nature of designing and building your own. Like your first build my first mini-mill had a myriad of imperfections and yet I did good work with it
for eight years. I have eliminated many of the imperfections with my new machine, but almost inevitably made a whole bunch of new ones. 'Progress not perfection'.
My new mill is at least an order of magnitude more rigid, accurate, powerful and fast.

Amongst the things that I have learned is that some matters which you might think very important are not and other matters which you barely considered are.

Probably the most obvious to me is flood cooling.

I had it on my mini-mill, but it was poor conceived and I seemed to spend a lot of time cleaning up. My new mill is much better, but the coolant filtration system needs
a major rework. When it works the way its supposed to its a dream, beautifully clean cut parts and many tens of hours of tool life. When it doesn't, say it blocks up, then
first is that you wreck the tool and usually the job with it....unless you keep your eyes on it continually.

The plastic parts I'm making at the moment take 1.5 hrs over two operations. I've had to bring the boring operations forward in the sequence of operations so that I can
ensure the tool has no swarf wrapped around the shank of the tool and thereby wreck the boring op. I really need a ring of coolant nozzles around the tool with moderately
high pressure to keep pesky swarf/chips from building up. It's little details like that, that cause the most grief and yet those same little details when attended and allowed for,
have a 'night and day' difference to the finished parts.

Craig