hi /diy/ I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. Looking

How good's your mini-mill, and what kind of work area do you need? Budget?

Your "pic related", along with the average aluminum "CNC mill" is really more of a CNC router. Good for softer sheet goods, not so hot for smaller, bulkier, harder parts.

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6040 owner here. It's hot swamp ass. Do not recommend. I've done extensive upgrading to it, including replacing the flimsy faggot rail extrusion bed with a solid 1/2 in tooling plate and mounting it on a 150lb cast iron surface plate to damp vibrations. Had to buy a smoothstepper to get around nonexistent 64 bit parallel port driver for mach 3. Does ok as an engraving machine. Really struggles to mill aluminum and leaves horrid surfaces. Might be ok for plastic or wood. Dealing with the chinese is a fucking nightmare. Manual is in chingy chongy engrish and pin assignments are wrong.

Buy a bridgeport.

>>1140811
I'm on a literal shoestring. Maybe 2k. I've seen some vids of the 3040 and 6040 doing some decent aluminum though not too sure. I also don't have to be very precise. It can be about .5 mm off maybe a little more

>>1140895
Deepgrove1 if it's big enough for you

If you want larger scale metal milling you're going you have to extend that budget

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Hey, not OP, but can anyone recommend from personal experience a decent cnc mill for wood and foam? I do carpentry and aluminum casting.

Shopbot CNC machines are great, used one in the high school shop for mostly wood, but sometimes for al plate. They are pretty robust and reliable, and are American. Their software is a little meme if you are used to industrial controls like haas but shopbot can interpret normal nc g code files from any old cad/cam package. Autodesk fusion is free for diyers and works nicely for making models and g code.