How to select a milling machine - a guide

samthedog

Token Aussie
Registered
Joined
Nov 21, 2012
Messages
793
After the success of the lathe article I wrote and a request to make a sticky of it, some requested an article on selecting a milling machine. I have written an article about this in my blog and have contacted Nels to see if he wants to feature it here. Let me know what you think:

http://wanderingaxeman.blogspot.no/2014/12/selecting-and-buying-metal-milling.html

Like everything, I could have written more however at some point you just have to walk away. Feedback is welcome.

Paul.
 
Last edited:
That's a very comprehensive article! It's not an easy task that you've set yourself either :)

My suggestion? Be clear at the beginning who this guide is for, what level of experience does your target audience have? If it's complete beginners, then a fair bit of that information information will be over their heads or not in a context where they can get it into their sphere of knowledge. If it's for people that already have some experience and have other machine tools then they'll already know allot of it, but may not know what you mean when you say "get a mill with the same capacity as your lathe".

It's also a risk (and one that I'm frequently guilty of) in such an information heavy field to make such guides a list of information. That information is clearly useful, otherwise you wouldn't have included it, but your reader may not understand why it's useful. Why do you need to have your mill in tram? How do you do it and what do you need?

It may be more useful to divide the article up into sections, such as " just starting out with machining, what are the big things I need to know about mills ", " got some machining experience but can't tell between a knee mill and a bed mill, let alone why I'd want one over the other " to "now I know what I want, how do I find what I want without getting a lemon". That way you can also tailor each section to a particular audience.

It's really hard to teach a subject that you know very well to people that don't know it at all as they have none of the assumed context that we have accumulated over the years (as I was told in some of my teaching feedback). It's quite a trick to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what they need to know and how to reach them it!
 
All good points Matt. The article was really designed to get people thinking about the features and doing some research on their own. If I was to design this to be comprehensive and more of a manual then I would have certainly set out a few objectives at the start for the reader and followed up on these through the article. This would quickly have turned turned into a blog of its own :))

I build technical training for a living in the subsea oil industry and cover subjects like hydraulic systems, sensor interfaces and materials technology for the novice all the way to the experienced. I was steering away from spending the typical 20 - 30 hours of development per hour of reading / training without an instructor and approached this as more of a memory dump of what I wish I knew when I was hunting for a mill. I just happened to be lucky enough to have landed an excellent mill completely by mistake.

I will go back to the article over time and improve on the format so thanks for the feedback!

Paul.
 
You're welcome Paul and props to you for taking the time to do it. It's a hard task whichever way you tackle it, that's for sure!
 
Back
Top