CNC & the Harbor Freight Mini-Mill

I wanted a small Mill and ended up settling on the Seig X2 / Harbor Freight Mini Mill. I already owned a Cummings Tool Mini Lathe so it matched the capabilities of that.

I alredy knew I was going to convert it to CNC so I’d purchased the Stirling Steele plans before the Mill arrived. Installation went easily enough, I was new to machining so it was a good learning experience and I picked up some tooling along the way too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a37Gqjg6GgA

I used it like that for a few months, then started looking at converting the X and Y to ballscrews. I could have altered the Stirlinge Steele over, but instead opted to go with a CNC Fusion Kit #3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf1awhU2UOc

The Ballscrews are so much faster than the Acme screws and the CNC Fusion kit is excellent.

I dont make anything fancy, and I’m still on the steep part of the learning curve.

Mach3 CNC Controller software has an option for using a webcam as an edge finder so that was one of my first projects and worked out quite well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIBJMOKUS0w

Contour ShuttlePro as an inexpensive Pendant makes jogging the mill easy and lets me use the mill as a “manual” mill with the benefit of a Digital Read Out (DRO) for quick jobs that dont need any CAM work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09HiUnPDeTY

Here’s an example of a simple part I made using CamBam+ CAM Software – I could have done it manually, but then there wouldnt be a video here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olcOdBj4CGE