Mill/drill?

F

f21sh

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I have access to purchasing a mill drill the central machine model 1 1/2 HP etc... Would this mill/drill perform 60% of the tasks that a gunsmith would use a mill to perform?????:D
 
A friend started out with a mill drill & was disappointed with the results. It didn't have enough travel & flexibility as a drill and wasn't stiff enough to do the milling he really wanted to do.

He figured that at that time (he was a hobbyist then) he would have been better off using a milling attachment on his lathe & saved up for a real mill - which he has now.
 
I use a mill/drill which is called a RF-45 and has a dovetailed column and an R-8 spindle. I use it for everything I do and it works fine. I've even milled a couple of barrels octagon with it. With a 1/2 inch end mill, a .100 cut is OK. I don't know how this relates to the mill you are looking at. Years ago, I worked where the only mill available to me was a smallish mill/drill with a morse taper spindle (#3 as I recall) and I was able to do most any thing I needed to do with it. I did mostly dovetails and Sako extractor conversions but also made a Weatherby trigger housing from steel to replace the pot metal one which had broken. So, the little mill was not ideal by any stretch of the imagination but it was adequate for the tasks at hand. Regards, Bill
 
The mill/drill combos that I have seen have been woefully inadequate in the lathe dept. My neighbor, who ironically,is a retired VP from Clausing, bought a Grizzly mill/drill last year and it is a POS. It has no quick-change gears for threading and is noisy as a lawnmower.

The mills will certainly do light duty stuff.
 
Bill Leeper said:
I use a mill/drill which is called a RF-45 and has a dovetailed column and an R-8 spindle. I use it for everything I do and it works fine. I've even milled a couple of barrels octagon with it. With a 1/2 inch end mill, a .100 cut is OK. I don't know how this relates to the mill you are looking at. Years ago, I worked where the only mill available to me was a smallish mill/drill with a morse taper spindle (#3 as I recall) and I was able to do most any thing I needed to do with it. I did mostly dovetails and Sako extractor conversions but also made a Weatherby trigger housing from steel to replace the pot metal one which had broken. So, the little mill was not ideal by any stretch of the imagination but it was adequate for the tasks at hand. Regards, Bill
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I agree, the dovetail column RF45 and similar machines are useful milling machines. In fact the dovetail column concept is very common in CNC mills. The typical round column mill drills are more drill than mill, but they are more capable than the milling attachment on a lathe. The problem with a lot of them is loss of spindle alignment when the head is moved. The RF45 doesn't have that problem which is a huge feature.

For those who may not have seen an RF45, this is what they look like:

http://www.emachinetool.com/tooling/temp_top_two.cfm?FamilyID=RF45&Source=PTC

Fitch
 
The Central 1-1/2 HP is the lower end classic Mill/drill. Considering that you normally don't do alot of heavy, complex, milling work starting out in amature gunsmithing, I would say that it would do 100%. A mill/drill is better than no mill. One caution: Cheap mill/drills come with cheap tooling. Often it is the poor tooling which causes many of the problems.
 
Mill Drill

Butch that is not the one I was looking at. The one I was looking at is actually smaller. My space is becoming a limiting factor along with power. I was also looking at the IH mill. Does anyone know anything about the IH mills.
 
Butch Lambert said:
Slugger,
I think you are thinking of something else.
Butch
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Butch- after I re-read his post I realized I was talking about those shop-smith type 3 in one machines. My bad.

I have used a regular mill/drill for some light stuff and it worked fine. Travel was very limited however.
 
I've been using one I picked up from MSC a couple years back model #00685420. I did make sure I got it with a DRO. Since going to this machine my drill press rarely ever gets used. I did get rid of the vise that came with it immedeatly, and replaced it with a rotary table and tool makers vise. There are two things I'd like to have different. First I'd like one with more travel, this works for about 90% of my work, but some things would go smoother with more travel. Second if you get everything set up, and didn't get the height of the power head at a point where you can do all of the operations on a particular piece, you will loose your zero when you reset the height. Eventualy I will replace it with a knee mill with a longitudinal feed in the neighborhood of 30".
 
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