4″ and above traction engine really wants a Bridgeport size floor standing mill not a benchtop one. Though a benchtop will be fine for just the Allchin

Fwiw, a mill and adding even the basic tooling to it starts to quickly add up. Depending on what you might want for extra capability and accessories, it’s not hard at all to multiply any sized mills initial price by 2-3 times over the years. Without having a lot of experience, I’d very much agree about just buying something that’s adequate or slightly larger for your Allchin project and see how that goes. Trying to buy far larger in anticipation of much larger future projects that may or may not ever happen could get expensive and waste money. At a certain point, most of us have to decide due to available space and monetary decisions what our actual project size limitations are.

As an example, castings, materials etc for a 1.5″ scale Traction engine (or anything else) are going to cost X amount. Double that to even 3″ scale, and the material prices alone will rise by approximately 8 times.

Dan

Fundamentally it’s down to room.

If you have the space and plan to be a manual machinist the no-brainer option is a Bridgeport mill and a 5″ or 6″ centre height ex-industrial (preferably training or maintenance shop) lathe. Colchester Student / Master, Harrison L or M,  Smart & Brown 1024 et al. Disclosure I have a Bridgeport and a 1024 VSL which play well together with a P&W B for the bigger stuff.

Starting smaller and trading up when needed always seems the sensible option but it’s surprising how much money dribbles away in between things. Either directly or due to outgrowing tooling.

This antediluvian penguin had to do it that way for financial and availability reasons.

Industrial standard machines at affordable prices are very much a this century phenomenon. Last century was a different world. My pal Mike-the-Pilot jumped straight in with a Bridgeport and Master and never regretted it. Doing inflation compensated cost comparisons with my journey was “interesting” I guess he spent under half in real terms with lots less futzing around trying to make a boy do a mans job. But I’ve always been Home Shop guy working in 12 inch to the foot scale not Model Engineer.

Size wise mills are very deceptive. They inherently sprawl and the work envelope has to include the work holding gear and tooling so, especially on smaller mills you lose a lot of space. In particular it’s easy to overlook however much room you sometimes need to set things up. Before the Bridgeport I had one of the short, 28″, table versions of the big square column bench mills. In a practical “I don’t like being buried in chips” world the bench mill was the equal of the Bridgeport but working on that little table and peering round the big square head could be a major pain. 49″ of Bridgeport table means I can just wind it out to one side if the head gets in the way.

These days I’d take a serious look at a Trak or similar CNC equipped Bridgeport type mill rather than automatically going manual.

Obviously you need a good drill. I found a Pollard 15AY at a price that bought my wallet out smoking but any of the heftier breed will do fine. Import or Brit. Heck talking about saving money my mate John picked up one of the big Denbigh No 1 drills on “free if you haul” basis. Most impressively capable machine. Power down feed and all. Who cares if it looked like it came out of Noahs workshop clearance once he’d finished the Ark.

An absolute must to find something that effectively and effortlessly sharpens drills on a walk up and do in a minute or two basis. My Clarkson is great but overkill just for drills. So nice to always have a sharp drill.

Don’t forget stock cutting. The 7″ small import bandsaws are vastly better than the smaller 6″ x 4″ breed which suffer  due to the savage blade twist between wheels and guides. Power hacksaws such as my Rapidor are virtually given away.

Affordable VFD boxes mean that three phase is generally not an issue.

Last point. A very important one. One “benefit” of long life is having your nose rubbed in the fact that the world changes.

Whether you like it or not.

Looking back over 20 or 30 years makes it obvious. That the post year 2000 world is very different than pre 2000 means that date needs to be factored in when taking advice. Cheap computing power everywhere makes me think another shift is on its way.

Clive

Hi Dan

After doing the  redundancy / part time consultant thing in 2004 I upgraded my home workshop into something sufficiently industrial to take in part time paying work. Initially planning to supplement consultancy income and, later, generate some money alongside aged parent carer duties. So I got a first hand look at how things had changed from when I built up the original shop between 1975 and 1995 (ish). In the event the consultancy thing was much more lucrative than expected (3 years full time!) so I did very little paying work but got some serious help from the taxman towards a very nicely kitted out toybox.

These days a Bridgeport style machine with Anilam, Trak or whatever “finger-cam” CNC box can be got at an inflation corrected price pretty equivalent to the installed cost of my Bridgeport after essential overhaul and adding a Sino DRO glass scale set.

Cost of upgrading old electronics is dropping steadily too so moving form a more basic box to full “direct from 3D CAD” CNC has become much more practical. It’s noteworthy that getting stuff to do the once popular manual Bridgeport to CNC conversion has gotten much harder since maybe 2020.

Concerning lathes have you considered looking into the “teach” type CNC/Manual crossover machines. After correcting for inflation real world used machine prices seem to be dropping towards something similar to what I paid for my 1024 in 2004.

Before getting the Master and 1024 respectively Mike-the-Pilot and I took a very serious look at retrieving a pair of Harrison Trainer 280 CNC teaching lathes from deepest darkest Wales before ruling it out due to cost professional  transport cost to Sussex. In the event this would have been viable due to simple CNC running off (basically) a BBC micro with plain stepper drives making them easily upgradable. More modern machines are much more useable as is.

Now that 3D CAD programs like Fusion et al are readily available old style manual only is starting to look as obsolete as chalk marks on the dial and calipers. There is no doubt that modern 3D CAD and CNC vastly expands what it is practical to do. If i were 10 years younger I’d likely be mid way through switch.

Fundamentally what you get now is likely to nail your situation for the next 20 years. By which time shifting a pure manual machine may well be near impossible.

Clive

Big mills are cheaper.