I was looking on the internet for info on these milling machines. I couldn't find too much but lots on the Grizzly GO704 which I gather is the same thing. Page after page on the plastic drive gears stripping. Are these machines really that fragile? I wanted to go one up from a mini mill.
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Busy Bee Cx600 Milling Machine And Plastic Gears
- Thread starter Garyg
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- Jan 2, 2014
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I use Grizzly manuals all the time for Busy Bee products.
The Grizzly ones are readily available, the Busy Bee web site seems to be getting worse every time I see it!
I have no experience with plastic gears on a mill.
-brino
The Grizzly ones are readily available, the Busy Bee web site seems to be getting worse every time I see it!
I have no experience with plastic gears on a mill.
-brino
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
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- 9,574
Here is the manual for the mill you are looking at. http://busybeetools.com/content/product_manuals/CX600.pdf
Bob
Bob
I have a G0759 (which is a G0704 with DRO). Of note is that all these mills are essentially rebrands of a Weiss WMD25LV (or WMD25) with an R8 collar (http://www.weiss.com.cn). I converted mine to a belt drive due to the noise and vibration reduction you can get with that. There are 2 Delrin gears in the machine. They are _supposed_ to break when you for instance crash the machine hard and your tool gets stuck. The idea is that the motor is more expensive to replace than the gears, or worse your bearings in the spindle get destroyed. Just have a few extra at hand and you should be fine. I've used mine without belt drive for 6 months and never had an issue, though I never crashed/stalled the machine at full motor output.
Another option would to be to wait for a version of the new Sieg X2.7 to become available here. It has a belt drive and similar specs to the WMD25LV. http://www.siegind.com/products_detail/&productId=166.html Nice review here:
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Used my PM25 (earlier model with the plastic gear) for months before I converted to a belt drive. Never had a problem, even with a 3/8" rougher in mild steel. Going slowly of course. 
I remember someone complaining about stripping the gear, but they were using something like a 5/8" or 3/4" end mill. Way too big for this size machine IMO. If you use the machine within it's design envelope it will work well. Push it and things break. If you need to use endmills that large, I would suggest looking at a larger machine that won't break/wear out from the overstressing. Just my perspective.
I remember someone complaining about stripping the gear, but they were using something like a 5/8" or 3/4" end mill. Way too big for this size machine IMO. If you use the machine within it's design envelope it will work well. Push it and things break. If you need to use endmills that large, I would suggest looking at a larger machine that won't break/wear out from the overstressing. Just my perspective.
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- Apr 22, 2015
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I have a G0704 with the plastic gear on the motor. The mesh between this gear and the intermediate shaft gear was excessive when I first started using the machine. This made it noisy and I'm sure if I had crashed it the gear would have stripped/broken. I readjusted the mesh slightly for more contact and now it runs quieter and is probably not so prone to breakage. I am ordering a spare gear though just in case.
Plans for the future include a larger motor and possibly a belt drive system.
Plans for the future include a larger motor and possibly a belt drive system.