--- On Thu, 4/25/13, kqt4a...@gmail.com <kqt4a...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thanks for the many good opinions but I am going to be > squeezed to fit in something with a footprint as small as > the smithy > I have looked several times at the X2/X3's but I have no > room for a separate lathe > Is there a better 3-in-1 than the smithy in the $2000 range
Look at the ones with the mill column attached to the middle rear of the bed. this company http://www.siegind.com/ manufactures the lion's share of the Chinese machine tools imported to the USA. What I think would be most usable for a 3-in-1 would be to put a small turret mill ram and head on top of the lathe headstock, thus making it sort of like a horizontal mill with the table axes turned 90 degrees. The biggest compromise with 3-in-1 machines that have the mill head on the headstock is lack of throat depth, have to take the chuck off to do much with the mill. If you make something to index the spindle you can drill spaced holes around a piece in the lathe but only directly beneath the mill spindle so that's a very limited function. If the head was on a sliding ram that would be very useful. CNC it and could do thread milling with a 60 degree pointed end mill... but since (AFAIK) there ain't such a thing as a turret head 3-in-1... With the mill column in the middle, you have a machine closer to the capabilities of a small bed mill, much more useful X axis (relative to the mill) travel but still a small table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_apr _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
