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I used a combo Grizzly unit (looks like the G0516 looking at their website) for a couple years at a job. Not my "primary duty" or whatever, but I spent probably better than half my time turning parts and attempting to use the mill, all in a gunsmithing capacity. In short; don't waste your money.
I'm not familiar with the used machinery market in Texas, but I'd hold out for decent used machines, which may take months or more to find the right deal. I watched casually for about 8 years before I found my lathe at the right price/quality juncture, but I'm probably unreasonably picky.
The combo Grizzly was especially horribly in a few regards:
- It had "DROs" only. These were the form of digital read outs on the dials, which replaced any analog readout completely. I hated this, and found them to be relatively inaccurate. I eventually developed a feel for the "real offsets" and printed a chart to post on the wall to the effect of "reading 0.001 is true movement of 0.0025" Across larger distances they weren't terribly out, so I'd use them to rough in a part and leave 5-10 thou, then measure between every cut and creep up on it. Took forever to make anything, but got me there. This dial discrepancy was discovered when I trusted it and put holes in the wrong spot on a relatively rare FN shotgun receiver - just far enough out to make drilling them correctly impossible without repair beyond our tooling abilities. I still lay things out by hand now, even when using top of the line machines with .0001" DROs at work.
- There was a rheostat to adjust speed, which complemented change gears, and I presume the gear chart was lost before I got there. Basically, you never knew what RPM you were actually running. When I arrived, it was geared to run the fastest possible speed (i.e. too fast for anything we'd ever actually do), and the tooling was installed in the lathe upside down. I wish I were joking.
- The mill had very little Z travel, enough so that it was difficult to get a 3-4" tall item on fixtures then under tooling, and I never even attempted to run a drill chuck, probably because the place was too cheap for one.
Expect to spend at least as much as you spend on the machine, on tooling. I suggest looking at and prioritizing the work you expect to do, and prioritize machine and tooling accordingly. A lot of folks advocate buying a lathe first, but if you really need a mill and can only use a lathe occasionally, my logic says a mill is the smarter first buy. I'd try to buy one and get it reasonably tooled up before you buy the second machine. That way you can do some work while you save for the other machine, instead of having two machines with no tooling to do any work
I'm not familiar with the used machinery market in Texas, but I'd hold out for decent used machines, which may take months or more to find the right deal. I watched casually for about 8 years before I found my lathe at the right price/quality juncture, but I'm probably unreasonably picky.
The combo Grizzly was especially horribly in a few regards:
- It had "DROs" only. These were the form of digital read outs on the dials, which replaced any analog readout completely. I hated this, and found them to be relatively inaccurate. I eventually developed a feel for the "real offsets" and printed a chart to post on the wall to the effect of "reading 0.001 is true movement of 0.0025" Across larger distances they weren't terribly out, so I'd use them to rough in a part and leave 5-10 thou, then measure between every cut and creep up on it. Took forever to make anything, but got me there. This dial discrepancy was discovered when I trusted it and put holes in the wrong spot on a relatively rare FN shotgun receiver - just far enough out to make drilling them correctly impossible without repair beyond our tooling abilities. I still lay things out by hand now, even when using top of the line machines with .0001" DROs at work.
- There was a rheostat to adjust speed, which complemented change gears, and I presume the gear chart was lost before I got there. Basically, you never knew what RPM you were actually running. When I arrived, it was geared to run the fastest possible speed (i.e. too fast for anything we'd ever actually do), and the tooling was installed in the lathe upside down. I wish I were joking.
- The mill had very little Z travel, enough so that it was difficult to get a 3-4" tall item on fixtures then under tooling, and I never even attempted to run a drill chuck, probably because the place was too cheap for one.
Expect to spend at least as much as you spend on the machine, on tooling. I suggest looking at and prioritizing the work you expect to do, and prioritize machine and tooling accordingly. A lot of folks advocate buying a lathe first, but if you really need a mill and can only use a lathe occasionally, my logic says a mill is the smarter first buy. I'd try to buy one and get it reasonably tooled up before you buy the second machine. That way you can do some work while you save for the other machine, instead of having two machines with no tooling to do any work