I had done a few cuts with it, to see it going, but here is the first real part.

Its 5mm alloy plate – the start of a tool holder for the tooling bits for the Mill.

All those holes are perfectly aligned and spaced – something that I’ve never been able to do by hand, until now that is 🙂  The outer edge has been machined too, so its perfectly square too.

The weight and rigidity of the mill has made a massive difference to even my existing tools, like my hole saws.  On the mill, they cut so much cleaner on the mill than they ever did on the drill press – I’m very impressed, and happy.

I made a little overhead cupboard to store all the tolling for the mill.  I wanted something with a door on it to protect all of the finely machined surfaces of the tools from flying angle grinder sparks, weld splatter and any other muck that I’m spraying around.  The tool holder shown above will live in this cupboard too.

Pics soon….

Got our performance bonus from work last week, so it was time for shopping.

For a long, long time I’ve wanted a milling machine.  Each time something else came up, or things just didn’t work out.  Well no more!

Managed to get the monster home without incident!  That was a not a relaxing drive.

When loading it on the trailer at the shop, they only had a forklift.  To fit it over the side of the trailer we had to stack it on two pallets.  This made it much higher than I was anticipating.

Now, the reason why this was a problem was that then plan was to back the trailer into the shed under the hoist, and use that to lift the nearly 900kg off the trailer and onto the ground (That’s heavier than the race car – which is now 890kg).

With it packed up on pallets it was now going to be too high to get into the shed…. hmmm…..

No probs, I’ll rotate the head sideways, cause that will give me plenty of room.  The only issue was that I couldn’t figure out how!  (In the end there was a locking pin in there that I did not find until after it was in the shed)

So, first thing was to remove the motor, as that sticks up making the tallest part of the machine.  The backed it up to the shed to see how much more height I needed.  About 5cm too high still….

Next was to use an old trick, let down the tyres on the trailer, which will lower the whole trailer.  That did the trick and I finally got the trailer in under the hoist, very relieved, as when they loaded it onto the trailer on two pallets at the shop – I was wondering how I was going to get it off as it looked way too tall to fit into the shed!

Then put some straps under it, connected to the arms on the hoist and lifted it just enough to get the pallet off the trailer, then pushed the trailer out the way and lowered it onto the ground.

Did the same thing again to get it off the pallet, and then lowered it onto a piece of sheet wood, with a bunch of metal tubes under it – Egyptian pyramid building style.  Then  by moving it forward, taking the poles that rolled out the back and putted them back under the front again, I started the slow push from one side of the shed to the other.

I figured out that by putting the poles under the front on angles, I could actually steer it 🙂   Well, a little bit of steering anyway.  So with some 3 point turns, some crab steering across the shed, she was finally almost in position.

Then, using the block-and-tackle hooked to the roof, I was able to tilt the mill enough forwards and backwards to edge it across into its final position, and remove the metal poles from under it.

And here she sits….

Then it was a little bit of cleaning up, wiring up security lights on the shed and hooking up the house alarm to the shed as well.  After that, it was 2am, so well and truly time for bed.

Spent some time cleaning up, and making some new bits up for the lathe and the shed.

I drilled and tapped some proper mounting points for the extra axis that I purchased for the lathe, so that’s now all ready for use the next time I need it.

I had also gotten some new tips for the cutting tools on the lathe, so I fitted them as well.  I then got to lining all the tools back up in the lathe, getting the tool heights correct again.  I also fitting the new parting off tool that I got.

Apart from that, a bunch of cleaning and packing away getting ready for a big day tomorrow.