Quote Originally Posted by wm460 View Post
More I have been read about Optimium the more I am leaning towards the Seig.
I see that the Aussee SX3 has already got a belt drive in it, another good point is the the SX3 has the hight adjustment handle is at the base not at the top of the column like the Optimium.
In my area I would be buggered if I got problems like BaronJ and Hornetb
In which case I wouldn't buy any machine of this ilk. I know people have to work to a budget and there's the attraction of buying a new machine, but in these cases new does *not* equate necessarily to trouble free, nor to any comfort factor regarding warranty.

I have 4 milling machines and every one has been bought used. 3 of them have been excellent, the other I bought on eBay without seeing it. It arrived with a non-functional power feed and more wear than I thought. It is still useable though and one day I'll look into the power feed issues as it might be as simple as the missing telescopic shaft between g/box and knee. FWIW it cost me *half* the new price of the mini-mill under discussion here and the table alone masses more than these things.

Point is that there's a pretty good chance of a satisfactory result with a used mill, probably at least as good as buying a new Chinese one. Plus you get a *lot* more mill for your money. Those things are really desktop toys IMO, barely capable of cutting anything tougher than aluminium.

WRT the straight edge needed to spot the slides, I may be able to assist there depending on the length of the ways. I have a few SE castings, a couple of them mostly machined, and I'm about to do a batch of Mk 2 models in the very near future as soon as I make the patterns. As I said, I'm pretty flat out with the boat ATM (painting before the weather goes to crap), everything else is taking second place so scraping in the machined one hasn't happened yet. Since I just stripped the big Monarch taper attachment apart to make some missing bits - which meant disassembling the cross slide etc - it would be nice to check the cross slide ways so I may scrape one SE in. We shall see.

PDW