I have been reading around in my free time, but a lot of the threads are too specific or advanced for me to pick up anything useful, so now i will just ask some questions...keep in mind, new to metal working.

I am a paintballer, i love to mod my guns, but now i've hit college and after going through our into design and fab class...i'm fascinated by the possibility of modding my gun body, which is aluminum.

Bodies are all already shaped, and i wont be doing heavy milling, just light things like taking a little material (about 1 or 2 mm's) off of one face to reduce the wall thickness. Is this do-able with the cheap mini-mills that companies like harbor freight offer?

Also tooling, ive been told that tooling can often run me as much as the mill itself....what kind of tooling would i need for the projects projects i'm thinking about?

Are there any newbie threads in the forums I can look at? Thanks =)

In order to help most people would need to know what sizes you are talking about, As this is mainly a CNC forum, you find much help with that. I suggest you read some of the benchtop forums, if you respond look at the last dates as some are quite old. Several mills are commonly used in the benchtop range, mostly sieg, Indstrial hobbies, Rong Fu, and others.

chris