I’m thinking of cluttering up my workshop with another milling machine, and looking for recommendations/suggestions. I currently own an HM-48 which I converted to CNC, although I use it manually most of the time. I mainly work with relatively small parts, both steel and aluminium.

As long as I don’t get carried away with depth of cut and speeds it does the job, but it flexes a bit at times making it hard to achieve accuracy even with everything locked. I’ve added gas lifts to the head and bolted the top of the column to a solid concrete wall – it helped, but not much.

I believe that a universal mill would probably get me the rigidity and accuracy I’m after, but I wouldn’t want to be without a quill, so I’m thinking I should be looking for an NT40 Taiwanese turret mill, preferably with a horizontal arbor, and new or hardly used. Something like this, but hopefully not as expensive.

Would that give me a significant improvement in accuracy/rigidity over the HM-48? Any other suggestions or advice?


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