DIYbanter - View Single Post - Mill reccomendations for a robotics team?

In article .com,
says...

... We have access to a lathe (ie our machinist has one) but we
dont own a lathe. We don't have the resources to buy both lathe, mill
and their tooling (I dont think..) so although I know some would
disagree, we're starting with a mill.

It's not a bad choice, given that you have access to one elsewhere.
You can perform lathe operations in a milling machine, which is
actually easier and more effective than the reverse.

Also, we've considered the shooting star DRO and it looks to be very
nice, however, we are currently considering a mill that has 20 inch of
Z travel (travels are 30 1/8 , 12, 23.15 ) the shooting star DRO wont
cover our Z travel... AND its also nontrivially expensive (at $749, we
could get a small lathe). How does the accuracy compare on the
Shumatech DRO with chinese scales attached? we're not likely flood
cooling so fluid resistance is not that big of a concern

The Shooting Star instrument uses a piece of precision threaded
rod as the spar, with a shaft encoder geared to run along the
length. You can pretty much get whatever length of threaded rod
you want. I suspect that setup is +/- 0.001 inch at best, so
you can learn what you need to compare the two by simply inspecting
the web pages for each to see the specs. If you want to cut costs,
do not buy a three axis DRO, only do the X and Y axis.

Do not buy a lathe that costs 750 dollars. That would really
be a mistake.

Jim

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