My new Tormach mill arrived on Friday. It looks very good and heavy duty. I spent all Friday night and most of the day today fabricating a stand for it. I would have puchased the deluxe stand but the Duty,GST, Shipping, Cdn. to US dollar exchange and brokerage fees bring the cost of it to where it makes sense to build one if you have the facilities to do so. I am glad to see a new section for the Tormach here and thank you very much Mr. site owner, this is a great place. :)

Welcome to the forum Dave.
Paul does have a great site with a LOT of traffic and info.
I said G'Day

any pictures of new mill?

Please post info and/or pictures as you get things set up and running. Where will you be placing the mill - garage, basement, or other? How long ago did you order?

I'm itching to place an order for the Tormach mill myself but need to make space first and arrange for some vacation time. Mine will be in the basement of our townhome which will be tricky due to various factors. It will have to be disassembled and it seems like it would be a good idea to compare alignments to the spec sheet and resolve any problems before disassembly.

It's too hot here in the midwest for that sort of thing now so I'm hoping for a mid-September time frame.

Mike

I will post pictures later if I can figure out how to. I own and operate a small aircraft welding/machine shop. The shop is Transport Canada certified for aircraft welding. The shop is about 1200 square feet near the Calgary International airport. I am building a stand fromm 2"x2"x.125" wall HSS tube and 16guage sheet metal for the tray after which I will get powder coated white. I have been in the aircraft industry since 1980 doing welding and machining but no experiance with CNC. I have always farmed out the CNC work. Much of my work is "one of" and "two of" not huge numbers.

Dave,

If you have trouble posting pictures, email them to me and I'll do it for you.

BTW, about 30 years ago I spent 6 months in Blazac, just a bit north of the Cakgary International. It's a terrific part of the world to be in.

Mike

Thanks for the kind offer but I will have no trouble posting the pictures, I am just very busy at this time. Its nice to hear you were in Balzak 30 years ago. As soon as I have some pictures of interest, I will post them.

OK I put some pictures in my photo gallery here. I am not sure how to link to them from here.

I just saw the pictures. It looks good. Was it worth the work to build your own stand? also, did you set it up to run coolant?

Here are your pictures Dave. :)

Link:

http://www.cnczone.com/gallery/showgallery.php?cat=500&ppuser=30602



.

The stand took me about 20 hours to build plus $400.00 to powder coat, coolant tank, coolant pump, hardware, drains to coolant tank, instalation time for all above etc. etc. The time it took me to build this was time I could have been earning shop rate. A big no it was not worth building it, if I were to do it again I would order the deluxe stand that comes with coolant pump etc. I thought with the dollar exchange, shipping, GST, brokerage fees that I would be paying away too much but I guess not.

Hey its a nice stand I like it, in fact I,m jealous ! That machine looks like it can do miracles...

That looks like a nice stand and you seem to have plenty of space for access to your mill. Mine will be a lot more cramped :=(

What sort of coolant will you be using?

Mike

I will be using some stuff made by these guys because I have some around. I am not sure what I will use in the future.

.http://www.jokisch-limited.com/Water_soluble_CoolantFluids.htm

I use Jokisch tapping oil at work. It's pretty good stuff. Just smells pretty bad when it starts to smoke. I wonder how their coolant is, most be pretty good though.

I'll probably try some synthetic coolant in mine when it arrives. I need to find something with the least smell possible as it will be in the basement. I normaly run just about everything dry, except aluminium and stainless. I don't think this machine will have the power to do stainless dry but I may try it.

very nice mill dave. if you don't mind me asking, what did the mill set you back? what kind of tooling do you have for her? and what kind of controller are you using?

The cost of the mill only was $8010.00 Canadian dollars total including all shipping etc. I have a China made vise, P4 2.4 GHz PC running Mach 2 PCNC software, Tormach CNC quick change tool set, Elo touch screen monitor(ebay used) and a "T" slot clamp kit, Visual Mill 5 and Alibre express these all cost extra other than the Mach 2 software.

Hello,
I have a Tormach on order, should be here mid November, I have a shop in my garage and have recently been machining simple injection molds out of aluminum. I have been manually machining parts for 30 years and I think it's time to try my hand at CNC. I could use some help fiquring out the right software package. Featurecam was my first choice until I found out it cost $11,000...YIKES. Now it's down to Visualmill Basic or OneCNC express, the latter only has 2.5D.
Any help would be appreciated. I also have a Clausing 10x24 toolroom lathe for sale if anyone is interested.

Try a free trial of Vector Cad/Cam @ http:www.imserv.com.I'm old and a real computor KLUTZ, but was able to master the system ( 3d even ) in a few months.The system automatically spits most ISO G codes in seconds, all I do is add some M codes .Very economical, I really tried a lot of systems 1st. This one made the most sense, I'm even using it for my Lathe as it will automatically convert to lathe G code ( Z and X ).

Adobe (old as dirt )

Also take a look at Rhino (free demo) and MadCam.


Joules