Can Taig units mill 316L SS?

[moresnowdays]

I want to be able to make my own cases for diver watches from 316L surgical stainless. I thought, after finding the Taig site on a forum from watchuseek.com, that the lathe and micro mill looked great for their cost and size. Question is can they do the job, or should I really be looking at something bigger?

[Jeff-Birt]

The Taig can handle stainless just fine. You will have to use a much more conservative feedrate than if you were milling aluminum (of course). With stainless you need to keep your tools perfectly sharp and use a flood cooling system to avoid work hardening the material.

The next thing to consider is accuracy. When properly set up you can get the Taig mill down to around 0.0005"~0.001" backlash. The lathe with a 3-jaw self centering chuck can be trued to 0.0005" TIR, and with a 4-jaw chuck you can get it better than that.

So if your application fits within the physical limitations of the machine and you don't need a very high speed production then the Taig would work well.

[moresnowdays]

Thanks, sounds like it may work fine. The biggest cases that I've heard of are 60mm diameter, I think plenty small enough for a taig then. The tolerances that I've seen mentioned in watch forums is .05mm, so this seems reasonable as well. The only real draw back that I've read here is that it may be a rather slow going process on a Taig. I only think I will be producing a handfull of any one design, so I will live with it till funding for something bigger comes along.

Only question at the moment is, for the task, is this the best bang for the buck? Not really familiar with what else I might find. Seems like going used might bring more choices, but scrolling through classifieds does little for me when I don't know what I'm really looking at.

[MechanoMan]

Well I'm still learning on this but the Taig's not necessarily "slow", I wonder specifically what people refer to there. The mill is said to be "stiff", which means it's not going to be prone to flexing minute amounts under the pressure from the cutter. A machining op typically starts with a roughing pass and a finish pass, the finish pass having so little material to remove there is little force needed.

I have seen where the 1/4 hp motor can slow down, and many bigger mills can use more than 10k rpm which sounds useful for small bits because they need the rpm to get high surface speeds on small diameter bits.

I have no regrets on the selection of a Taig. Its price is remarkably low for what it is. Next step up that interested me would have been a KX1 or KX3 which is far more expensive, but didn't have worlds more to offer me for what I needed. Next step down was like a X1 or X3 but they didn't seem quite as capable and with the $ that goes into motors and drivers, there wasn't any reason to try to save a few $ on the mill itself.

[Jeff-Birt]

I think for the size of projects your going to work on you won't really see speed as an issue. No bench-top machine is powerful enough to do real 'high speed' machining.

Now being a Taig dealer I am biased. I do think that the Taig offers the most value for your dollar in this size machine. If you don't find anything in the classifieds then feel free to give me a shout. I'll make you a good deal on a new one