I can’t imagine not having at least one manual mill. We run them with powerfeeds so in most cases it’s much quicker to make parts than to bother with CNC. CNC is great for repetitive production but for a weekend warrior it’s probably overkill. I have some parts I make that are too much a hassle for CNC due to all the positional and tooling changes it’s just as easy to sit there and run the powerfeed levers and make two parts at a time. Unless you can walk away and do another project it really isn’t helping you. Perhaps an ATC would improve some aspects but having to change fixtures 4x an hour doesn’t give you much time to step away anyways. Definitely recommend having a manual version of anything you have for CNC. Presuming you have the available space and funding isn’t an issue.
The one thing I really miss is being able to run the CNC manually, it becomes really a hassle without hand wheels just to surface something or make a simple cut.
Wormwood[/QUOTE]