# Finally got myself a mill!



## keeena (Mar 14, 2020)

A bit of a gloating post - finally picked up my first mill today! Been wanting one for a while but haven't been aggressively looking. However, last week a friend of mine connected me with one of their friends who was selling one. It was solid and price was fair so I bought it in a heartbeat. We also negotiated in a Kurt vise, dividing head, spindexer, a few tool holders, and some end mills/fly cutters/etc...

The mill is an Alliant manufactured in 1986. This one has ballscrew leads, servos on the X/Y, Proto Trak Plus controller, and 1-shot lube. Motor is 2hp, 3ph infinitely variable speed. I wasn't intentionally looking for a 2-axis quasi-CNC, but will do the job (DRO and power X were on my must haves, so this fits the bill). Backlash is nearly nil and the ways have zero visible wear anywhere in the travel; the original scraping looks new. Meehanite casting.

Moved it today; took a few hours due to getting out of a tight location, but otherwise uneventful. Skid, pallet jack, and drop-bed trailer made it pretty easy; money well spent.

Plan on going through the tooling tomorrow and picking up the RPC in a couple weeks. Until then: some partial disassembly to give it a really good cleaning. If anyone has any tips or particulars with these mills, let me know what I got myself into!


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## mmcmdl (Mar 14, 2020)

Prototracs are a simple machine to program and run . That's a nice one . I had one sitting behind a cnc lathe at one time . I believe they stopped supporting the older ones , not absolutely sure though . Last time I visited the other shop I thought I saw much much bigger mills with Prototracs on them . 

Either way , it can be used as a manual mill .


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## DavidR8 (Mar 14, 2020)

Congrats on your new mill!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Winegrower (Mar 15, 2020)

And so it begins...


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## Kroll (Mar 15, 2020)

*SPLASH* dang what a package. Good way to get started,congratulations to new family member


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## Liljoebrshooter (Mar 15, 2020)

Very nice.  It opens the door to lots of new things. Especially sucking money out of your wallet.
Now get to makin some chips.

Joe Hynes


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## Lo-Fi (Mar 15, 2020)

That looks like an absolute score with all the accessories. You'll have some fun with that. Congrats!


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## keeena (Mar 15, 2020)

Thanks y'all; really excited to dig into it!


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## Choiliefan (Mar 16, 2020)

Wow, that's nice.
Congratulations!


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## Janderso (Mar 16, 2020)

You got a good one!!
Congratulations, let the fun begin.


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## aliva (Mar 16, 2020)

Now the expensive part, tooling.
Congradulations.


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## keeena (Mar 20, 2020)

Somewhat general question:

I've noticed that during certain table moves, the feed rate will occasionally slow down for no apparent reason. *Is this normal?* I noticed this when playing with bolt hole patterns.  The XY move will start its move from a hole location at one feed rate and then very quickly drops to a slower rate. The same exact bolt hole sequence can run again without this feed rate change. I am running a Do One Hole Pattern op so I wouldn't expect tool choice or other correcting items to factor in. That said: i have ZERO experience with this platform or CNC in general. I haven't adjusted any defaults or other persistent settings other than clearing out all pre-existing events. The operation still runs accurately.

I have only noticed it on XY moves when Y is positive (table moving towards column). I haven't tested more thoroughly yet. As I'm typing: i think running patterns with just X and Y moves (4 hole oriented at 45*) might be interesting.


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## brino (Mar 20, 2020)

Congrats on the "new" mill!
......and you got so many great options/accessories!
Wow.

-brino


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## teledan (Apr 22, 2020)

Nice! There is an Alliant close to me for sale that I might go take a look at. Do you mind telling me what you paid for yours?


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## dhprecision (Mar 5, 2021)

The ideas of what you can do with it will keep you up at night! Congrats!


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## Janderso (Mar 5, 2021)

Keeena,
How is that mill??


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## keeena (Mar 10, 2021)

The mill is great, thanks for asking!! Been collecting some tooling when I find good buys on eBay. Not a lot of projects yet - at this point its awesome just to have the ability do decorate the garage with chips and cutting oil potpourri. I did post a few things in the POTD, but i'll added a couple here too.

I looked into the weird feed-rate change problem a couple months ago. Determined that it only occurs with Y-minus moves. I swapped servos and problem stayed with the Y-minus: so that ruled out servo/encoders and the signal lines from the servos. I couldn't find any suspect wires or pins, so just started "fixing" things and testing after each change. In the course of doing so I thought I found the issue: the ribbon cable in the DRO/head unit between the DB25 and the PCB. I re-seated on the PCB and the problem was gone. It came back 2 weeks later but now I know where to look more closely.


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## keeena (Mar 10, 2021)

As she sits today: I added the way guarding and SS chip guards/tray; working on a power drawbar project.


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## Just for fun (Mar 10, 2021)

Very nice!


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