Finally got myself a mill!

keeena

H-M Supporter - Gold Member
H-M Supporter Gold Member
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Jun 10, 2019
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A bit of a gloating post - finally picked up my first mill today! Been wanting one for a while but haven't been aggressively looking. However, last week a friend of mine connected me with one of their friends who was selling one. It was solid and price was fair so I bought it in a heartbeat. We also negotiated in a Kurt vise, dividing head, spindexer, a few tool holders, and some end mills/fly cutters/etc...

The mill is an Alliant manufactured in 1986. This one has ballscrew leads, servos on the X/Y, Proto Trak Plus controller, and 1-shot lube. Motor is 2hp, 3ph infinitely variable speed. I wasn't intentionally looking for a 2-axis quasi-CNC, but will do the job (DRO and power X were on my must haves, so this fits the bill). Backlash is nearly nil and the ways have zero visible wear anywhere in the travel; the original scraping looks new. Meehanite casting.

Moved it today; took a few hours due to getting out of a tight location, but otherwise uneventful. Skid, pallet jack, and drop-bed trailer made it pretty easy; money well spent.

Plan on going through the tooling tomorrow and picking up the RPC in a couple weeks. Until then: some partial disassembly to give it a really good cleaning. If anyone has any tips or particulars with these mills, let me know what I got myself into! :)
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Prototracs are a simple machine to program and run . That's a nice one . I had one sitting behind a cnc lathe at one time . I believe they stopped supporting the older ones , not absolutely sure though . Last time I visited the other shop I thought I saw much much bigger mills with Prototracs on them .

Either way , it can be used as a manual mill .
 
Congrats on your new mill!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
SPLASH dang what a package. Good way to get started,congratulations to new family member
 
Very nice. It opens the door to lots of new things. Especially sucking money out of your wallet.
Now get to makin some chips.

Joe Hynes
 
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That looks like an absolute score with all the accessories. You'll have some fun with that. Congrats!
 
Thanks y'all; really excited to dig into it!
 
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