Unless you have a lot of dividing to do I would suggest that a rotary table with a set of dividing plates would be a better bet, not only will it allow you to do a lot of curved cutting, it will also have a slightly lower ctr height when used vertically and be considerably lower when being used with the spindle pointing upwards. The benchtop mills can be limited in head room so every little helps particularly once you add in the height of say a chuck on the dividing head, a drill chuck in the spindle and a drill bit.

Hi I bought a rotary table for my 16v mill and it is a 4 inch size and it has done every thing I wanted but the clamping slots which are cast on to outside of casting cause clamp studs to slip as I tighten it sometimes and I wish I had seen the one at Arc euro which uses slots to clamp with i also had to make an adaptor plate for my one to but th Arc one has one. Dont forget to buy a chuck to fit and make sure it is a low profile one. There is an adaptor to fit a dividing plate etc to there one when you need it.

David

Dave is right. Buy cheap, buy twice can be expensive where rotary tables are concerned. Even items from previously recommended suppliers might now be made ‘down to a price’ rather than ‘up to a quality’.

It has been mentioned on the forum recently that the earlier Vertex models were far more robust, when made in Taiwan, than the current offerings (which are sourced from elsewhere).

I would trust Arc in preference to Machinemart, for my engineering equipment supplies.

My first lathe was purchased from Machinemart around 25 years ago. My current lathe wasn’t.