Question 1: No; at least not new, secondhand may be – my horizontal mill was £145 plus VAT, although at 3500lbs it doesn't count as a mini mill

Question 2: Yes, 99.99% of my drilling is done on the vertical mill, I use the drill press about once a year. Of course a quill on the mill helps when drilling

Andrew

About the cheapest small mill that would be suitable for anything but the smallest work is the Sieg X1. It comes in several guises, probably the best being the one sold by Arc Eurotrade. This also seems about the cheapest but is £439 so above your number. I know a lot of people use these very successfully, look at …

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Yes you can use it for drilling but by the time you've put the chuck in the spindle there isn't much daylight left underneath. I don't have a pillar drill but I do have a milling machine I bought for having a lot of clearance under the spindle for boring long items.

It is, perhaps, worth bearing in mind that all the locos described by LBSC and Martin Evans (mostly) were designed to built without a milling machine- all the milling required was undertaken on the lathe with an angle plate or, for the wealthy, a vertical slide. It would seem, therefore, that even the smallest milling machine should be more than adequate for building locomotives- in 3 1/2" or 5" gauge at any rate.

HTH,

Rod

Do you have a lathe? CMD10 can be bought from Machine Mart for £350 on a VAT free day.

I recently bought the SX2P from ARC and so far its doing the job, still feeling my way around it though.

I did spot an old mag article for ARC where they had an offer on for their small mill and £100+ worth of extras for the same price as the bare mill.

The CMD10 is the same as the X1 I think but with a short table. AET much better to deal with than Machine Mart IMHO.

You really need to get in your car and drive to somewhere like Arc. Ketan will let you look at all of the machines and won't hassle you into buying anything.

As a beginner you will be pretty clueless when things don't turn out right. It will be much easier if you know that the machines and tooling you are using are up to the job. IMHO if you buy something without looking at it first you will regret it later.

David.

Ah but the rules are slightly different with a second hand market because the level of accuracy could be high but the price may not be, so long as the seller is unaware of it's true value. However, there are no standards to comform to like with a new machine(although it would've been built to one at the time of it's construction) so the buyer also has to know what he's dealing with.

With alot of older products there isn't always a direct comparison to benchmark your price with, so if you just want to be rid of a metal monster for some extra room it may not matter much to you how much it's worth.

Michael W

Edited By Michael Walters on 18/06/2016 11:05:57

You might want to look up government auctions. Schools and colleges often replace equipment on a regular basis. The biggest issue with older machines is their size and weight.

Simon,

If you tell us where you are, someone might have something suitable at the back of the shed that is too much trouble to advertise.