8520 - New to me, a few thoughts/questions

I have a Shars 5in vise I purchased back in February. It is good for my hobby needs. I did not get the swivel base.

A benefit of a VFD is if your pulley options do not provide the RPM you want to use. My original pulleys went from something like 450 to 950 rpm, nothing in between.

I love having a DRO on my milling machine and lathe. It is a lot easier than having to read the dials and set stops.
 
https://www.glacern.com/gsv_440
A little less money, but as Mark mentioned the shars is even cheaper. You might even want to consider one of the screwless vises

My mill is stepped pulley also, it does have a nice range of decently Spaced pulleys 130-3470 rpms. For me, I find the range good enough, I'd like variable but I don't have to have it. The dro was a huge step forward, my x and y screws do have a little slip. With igaging dros (much cheaper when I bought them) i can get very close now and repeatable...

Have fun
 
Is there a way to date the mill based on the serial number? Mine is # 003991
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I went with the Glacern 5" vise for my 8520. A lot depends on the size of material you think you'll be machining.
Mine came with an original Clausing accessory vice that I believe is a 4" vise. It turned out to be too small for a lot of projects.
DRO ???, here again depends on a lot of factors and price range you want to stay in.
Do you want to use a cheap, capacitive type scale DRO system, glass scales, magnetic ???
Do you want a dedicated manufacturer DRO display or an App based display like Touch DRO like on Yuriy's Toys ??? http://www.yuriystoys.com/
I decided on using Touch DRO. PM me if you are wondering why.
There's a ton of info on this site for your mill, just look and search around.

As far as VFD, my opinion is it's not worth it unless you do a custom change-out of the step pulley system.
Even with VFD, you'd need to perform belt changes on the pulleys to get full range speed control.
 
I bought an Enco 4" swivel vise for my Jet JVM-830 (similar to your 8520) 30+ years ago. Have never once used the swivel, and the 4" seemed to be a good size. I recently went to a Kurt 6" non-swivel on the mill which looks huge. It doesn't really buy me anything over the 4" other than rigidity as I lose some Y-axis travel because the fixed jaw is so deep and runs into the column.

Probably a 4" or 5" from Shars without a swivel will suit you well. Like you mentioned, if you upgrade some day it'd be a super vise for your drill press. If for some reason you have a custom job that needs a slot milled at a 45 deg. angle bolt the vise to a heavy plate, angle the plate appropriately and tie the plate to the table with a clamping kit.

Bruce
 
Thanks, Bruce. appreciate you sharing your experience, especially with the 6" Kurt. There is one on craigslist nearby for a decent deal with a swivel table, but it really just seems to big.

The note on the clamping kit has me thinking, I have a decent set of clamps that I could probably get a lot of jobs done with alone, just more work that a vise, and may require multiple setups for some jobs where I'd have to mill, move the clamps, re-index, and then mill again. I'll know soon enough, I'm picking up the last parts (mainly new belts) that I need for this over lunch, hopefully I'll be able to fire it up tomorrow.
 
Quick update. Clausing took their time to answer, a full 26 minutes, to tell me this mill is from 1962.
 
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