Multi milling tool

[Borscht]

Hi,

 

Does anyone have any experience with the cheaper hobby mills?

 

The ones that are modular and can be switched between a lathe, wood lathe, mill, sander etc etc?

 

Have been looking at a few but some look a bit flimsy and some look less practical for multiple uses.

 

Any info and links to ones you've used or some videos of real world application would be great.

 

Thanks 

 

B

[wefalck]

I believe the original one was made by the same guys that made the Unimat lathes and marketed from some time of the later 1980s on as UNIMAT 1. It was essentially meant to be an educational toy. It was all-plastic with a fairly weak 12V electric motor. All plastic means that it was not really suitable for metal work, though they did show examples of metal work. It is still made and marketed by https://thecooltool.com in Austria, near Vienna.

 

Later a metal version, UNIMAT MetalLine, was brought onto the market, which is a more serious proposition and can be used for light metal work.

 

Over the last decade or so plagiarised versions of Chinese origin also appeared on the market, which cost half or so of the original one.

 

In a way such combinations sound attractive, as one needs only one motor unit and can put together a wide variety of machines, such as lathe, horizontal mill, vertical mill, coordinate drilling machine etc. with one kit. From experience, however, I can say that in a production flow in shipmoldelling it may not be very practical, as you may have to move a part between machines for several operations and by reconfiguring the machine you loose the original set-up and, hence, precision. It is also time-consuming.

 

I cannot comment on the precision and rigidity, as I never had or operated one, but have the feeling that their claims are a bit exaggerated.

 

These machines also seem to be quite expensive for what they really are.

 

[No Idea]

I think we need to use the machines that our pockets allow.  wefalck's comments are spot on  - however I have seen some great results using cheaper machines but the trade off is time and waste.  Time is how long it takes to get it right and the cost of materials doing this is expensive.   Afford what you can and maybe upgrade later

[wefalck]

On the topic of cheap vs. expensive: obviously you get what you pay for, but often it is also a question of fine-tuning and adjusting. It pays to delve into some old-time mechanics' instruction books that give tips for adjusting machines to increase their precision and performance.

 

One should also not forget that lathes and mills are self-replicating machines, meaning that you can replace sometimes crudely made parts in a machine with more precise and improved parts made on the very machine ... there are lots of ideas and instructions for this on the WWW.

Edited 15 hours ago by wefalck

[Borscht]

I fully agree with most that's been said tbh, I think I might just save up a little and get something I've wanted for a while a nice desktop CNC, I've used AliExpress before for laser parts and have seen a fox alien CNC on there for just under 500, it's usually closer to 900 so I'm a bit sceptical, not sure if they are selling a copy or the actual model before it gets to FA and gets it's markup, my ortur stuff was legit tbh, I could use the CNC for more than just modeling too.