Mike Hunter makes a good and valid point about the electronic VFD's coming down in price and they work wonderfully well on a vertical milling machine. When I bought my vertical mill it had a static converter which I threw in the trash without even running it and purchased a VFD.
He also makes a excellent point (indirectly) about the weight of the vertical mill. Find one that is really heavy and one with a long bed and you will be happy. The long bed is really useful for building double barrel rifles with shoe lump barrels as you can mount a rotary indexer on the bed with the barrel between centers with the indexer and rotate the barrel to mill the barrel where the shoe lump with fit onto the barrel properly. I also built a rig to mount to the left end of the bed of my vertical mill where I could mount the double rifle barrels horizontally hanging from the left end of the bed (muzzle downwards). I could then mill out around the breech face of the barrels that I needed for the third fastener extension as well as the extractor slots. But you need for the vertical mill to be good an heavy to do this task without movement of the bed..
For the guys who have lots of room and wide doors to their shop a large horizontal mill can be bought for near nothing these days( a few hundred dollars as no one wants them or knows what do with them---we live in a CNC era). They are wonderful machines (weight a ton or more) and you will find tasks for them on occasions. I did not have room for one of them in my shop and bought a small horizontal mill, which could be used for cutting slits and so forth, but not much more because it only weighed a few hundred pounds. If I had a had a good heavy weight horizontal mill I could have milled the third fastner extension into the barrel breech end using it with little effort.
Another point for you that are considering outfitting a shop is the lathe. You can spend a great deal of money on rebuilding a used lathe (I mean a "real" rebuild where you have the bed reground and new headstock bearing and so forth). You will find that you need a couple of lathes of different sizes for your work. As to cost of a rebuild, "I have done that and been there" having found one of the last South Bend heavy 10 lathes built (1980's made) before they went out of business. It was one of the desirable ones with D1-4 headstock and 54 inch flame hardened bed. I bought it for $500.00 and spent $5,000.00 on making it perfect with a reground bed job, headstock rebuild, new tailstock and adding a electronic variable speed controlled carriage/apron feed screw. However today I would not do it because the quality of the Asian lathes have increased so much that I would spent the money and buy a new one from Grizzly or some other firm that met my needs and had a headstock hole larger enough for gun and rifle work. For example, the super accurate 3 and 4 jaw 6 inch chucks that I bought for my heavy 10 would now cost several thousand dollars for the pair. The best money you will ever spend on your lathe is the money you pay for a first quality chuck.
Last edited by bushveld; 09/09/20 03:57 PM.
