- Joined
- Aug 29, 2013
- Messages
- 1,050
I think the mill/drill is a pretty good idea. Of course, with tooling it will come to at least twice the original amount mentioned.
Now I will suggest some heresy:
Before I retired and got back into machining I was just a somewhat handy home owner. I had three machines: a table saw, a bench grinder, and a drill press. The drill press was a Skil I got at Lowes for about $120 if I recall. The vise was $20. $150 (tax) got me going. It had a rack for cranking the table up and down. Frankly it worked fine for everything I did. I even used it to drill through and repair the wife's cast iron bird bath. Later on I got a nice old Atlas that was definitely more heavy duty. But that Skil is still set up as my secondary drill press because of the crank table.
Just my experience.
Now I will suggest some heresy:
Before I retired and got back into machining I was just a somewhat handy home owner. I had three machines: a table saw, a bench grinder, and a drill press. The drill press was a Skil I got at Lowes for about $120 if I recall. The vise was $20. $150 (tax) got me going. It had a rack for cranking the table up and down. Frankly it worked fine for everything I did. I even used it to drill through and repair the wife's cast iron bird bath. Later on I got a nice old Atlas that was definitely more heavy duty. But that Skil is still set up as my secondary drill press because of the crank table.
Just my experience.