Cheap CNC milling machine

[monstrum]

Hello, I am new to this forum and honestly I am quite overwhelmed by all the sub-forums and sections. I hope this is the correct place to post this.

I have a small newly started business and I currently I am building a 3-axis camera mount for aerial photography. For prototyping I am using waterjet cutting. It is quite affordable but I feel more and more the limitation of pure 2D as I have to split parts just to make it work (such as a bearing bracket). Also, even though it's quite cheap, every part still costs much more than raw material and takes at least a week to manufacture and ship to me.

So I am looking into getting a CNC milling machine that could fit my requirements. I don't need extreme precision. The waterjet cutting service I use have something like 0.1 mm accuracy, and that is good enough. I also don't need to mill a part in 30 seconds. It could take 2 h for all I care. It is still going to be faster than waiting for someone else to cut it. The parts I need to machine are aluminum and G10 and would fit in 200x200 mm and the thickness is 10-12 mm max.
The budget is quite slim but I'm not looking for a DIY solution. Manual machine + CNC-kit could be ok if it get's be better quality for the money.
What about the $1000-$1500 desktop routers on ebay?

What can you recommend?

Best Regards
Alex

[webgeek]

I'm far from an expert but that seems to be a really tall order to me. The almost 8" x 8" envelop can be easily done via the router systems, but that ~.5" thick aluminum is far beyond the cheap routers I know of. You can get into a used CNC mill like an X2 for $1500 BARELY if you get lucky (at least I've never seen em get any cheaper) but it isn't going to do more than 4" y-travel without lots of modification and no where near 8" unless you are Hoss. It will handle the .5" no problem though. I'd love to hear if the experts on here know of a solution. Good luck!

Mike

[monstrum]

Thanks for your reply.

I read a review on a cheap Chinese machine and that made me aim for something else.


About the thickness of the material. If I run it in passes of 1 mm, will it make a difference if the total thickness is 2 mm or 10 mm?

I realize that if the depth is 10 mm, I need a longer bit to reach, but besides that, I can´t really see why it wouldn't work.

When I do manual milling it's of course hard to do precision work with multiple passes, but a CNC controlled dito should be able to do it quite well.

[rowbare]

A Taig mini mill can be up and running with a Gecko G540 setup for under 2K but with only 6" of Y it falls a bit short of your requirements. However you might be able to get around that with a bit of creative fixture design.

A couple of popular resellers are:

Soigeneris (you can google them)
and
http://www.deepgroove1.com/cncmill.htm

bob

[monstrum]

That sounds like a good suggestion. It might actually be fine with 6" on one of the axis.
Maybe it could be possible to cut bigger parts in two runs. The small offset between the runs will probably be ok in this case.