Time for a milling machine?

“So, once you have made the case for buying a vertical milling machine, new or second hand, what you should be looking for?”

In a typical home-engineering workshop progression, you buy a bench vice, some hand tools, and possibly a bench grinder. After you buy a small pillar drill then comes a big leap — buying a centre lathe.

Along the way you acquire more small tooling, drills, turning tools, etc. You make many useful items and produce a fair bit of scrap.

But then you find that the lovely pieces you are turning out on your lathe require other features, especially holes more accurately positioned than you can mark out and drill on your pillar drill. As good as you have become with a file, that flat section needed on the shaft really needs to be machined. And how are you going to make a slot for that keyway?

“When you have a typically small job to do, a very large machine can be very ungainly to use”

Milling machine

Another even bigger leap is now required — a milling machine. With this, you will be able to accurately pitch out holes, machine flat, machine slots, machine angles, square-up edges, and maybe start that model steam loco you promised yourself.

This leap often seems to be very daunting and it actually may be, in part due to the different milling-machine types — all centre lathes are basically the same layout and just vary