Smithy 3 in 1 ?

[fyffe555]

Hi all,

Thinking about getting a Smithy 1324I, anyone have any experience or comments>

Obviously there's the teardown/tramming issue but I don't have much room and this is going to be hobby, not time-is-money-making production.

thanks

Andrew

[HuFlungDung]

Well, I guess you can get one if you really want

Personally, I'm almost too lazy to shift gears on my manual lathes (and its got all kinds of handy gear shift levers) , let alone change over from lathe to mill and back, when wanting to drill a hole in something. But, you'd have to be the judge. Its one of those drawbacks that doesn't seem too bad until you've married it

[ViperTX]

I'm with Hu....I'd probably settle for a separate 8X14 lathe and a Mini Mill before I went with a Smithy.

[Aksess]

I use to have one about 8 Years ago. The lathe part is good, but the milling part was horrible.

[trilect]

Hmm well I ordered one a day ago. Smithy 1220LTD I hope it does what I need it to do and I can learn how to use it..

[kenlambert]

it will work fine after you get all the slop out and the 1220 ltd you can run the mill and lathe at the same time and do not have to remove the lathe chuck to do milling i have had mine about 3 years but i wish i had gotten a standerd lathe now that i have a big mill

[TPMX]

I have a 1340 I converted to cnc with mach3.
It is featured in there catalog.
I am selling the cnc conversion if anyone is interested.
I just purchased a Bridgeport cnc

[zogmon]

i have a smithy 1324 and have found it to quite usefull. it has it limits in that its not a high quality machine but i like mine

Originally Posted by fyffe555 Hi all, Thinking about getting a Smithy 1324I, anyone have any experience or comments> Obviously there's the teardown/tramming issue but I don't have much room and this is going to be hobby, not time-is-money-making production. thanks Andrew

[brad3378]

I have a Granite 1324 as well.
I have two main gripes:

1) It's difficult to mount a Digital Read Out and the CNC stepper motor mount simultaneously because of where they are each positioned. I've got a work-around mount design in progress, but I would have preferred their mounts to be interchangeable.

2) For milling large items, the X-Y travel is less than desirable.
Yes, you do get full X-axis travel of the table, but most of it is not usable since the Lathe (on the left side) is in the way. If I had it to do over again, I'd have purchased a used full size bridgeport (or a cheap Grizzly machine). To be honest, I don't use the lathe part as much as I thought I would.

[sharpshooter90]

When our unit was looking for a machine, we had certain criteria that were required in the purchase order. The most important ones were that we needed full CNC with lathe and mill capabilities and the unit needed to be compact and relatively portable . Compactness and portability eliminated seperate units, as well as the added expense of doubling the costs for CNC and DRO systems. That left the 3 in 1 machines as our choice. After a lot of research, we settled on the Shopmaster Bridgemill with 4 axes servo CNC, Ball screws and DRO. The Bridgemill had the milling capacity we needed without the lathe chuck interference you mention, plus the CNC, DRO and ball screws were installed when we received the unit. The Shopmaster has a clever bench design that utilizes the legs as part of the shipping crate structure, and the whole thing can be broken down, crated and loaded on a truck in about an hour. This was a big advantage if we needed to move forward or back ( NEVER HAPPENED) on short notice.