A Milling Machine

Very nice and a skilled person, like I am sure you are, can make all sorts of great metal projects with it. Drill press and metal lathe was the limit of my simple metal working skills - got permission in lab building satellite shop to make a few small pieces on lathe to save turnaround time since they were in the "just an annoyance" category for the skilled staff.
I'm sure you are going to have lots of fun!

Alan, if that's a benchtop machine your bench must be a lot bigger than mine.
Nice score!

Next comes a boring head and then you will need a cross slide rotary table. Also a lot of end mills and a few boring bars plus collets and a good drill chuck. And the money keeps flowing.

That DRO is so great to have.  All three of my mills (can I call a shaper a mill, probably not), just have dog bones with their scales.  My vertical is a Clausing 18XX.  My horizontal is a Burke, and my shaper is a South Bend.  Skills minimal.

Pardon my ignorance, but I have a question.

Would a milling machine work reasonably well as a substitute for a drill press in woodworking applications?  I'm not a machinist, and the woodworking I tend to do is more in the realm of trim carpentry (maybe someday I'll have time and energy to build some furniture).  I do, however, find myself occasionally trying to cobble together some metal parts for a repair or a mod on a vehicle or something, and thought that maybe a milling machine could help immensely in that.  If it could do double duty, all the better.

Jason

Nice looking lathe. Glad you got all that tooling with it. Tool bits are a lot cheaper than end mills. That is a good looking building.

Jason Roehl in Lafayette, IN wrote:

Pardon my ignorance, but I have a question.

Would a milling machine work reasonably well as a substitute for a drill press in woodworking applications?... I do, however, find myself occasionally trying to cobble together some metal parts for a repair or a mod on a vehicle or something, and thought that maybe a milling machine could help immensely in that.  If it could do double duty, all the better.

Jason

Most vertical mills are drill presses.  You can run them off the knee, or set them up so that you just pull a handle and they drill like a drill press.

The knee is the super power of the standard vertical mill.  What it does is give you a vertical adjustment that does not vary.  This means that you can raise and lower the head relative to the work, and maintain position.  So say I want to spot a hole somewhere.  I can use an edge finder to find an x/y edge, then locate position over that point with the X/Y controls, and use the Z axis/knee to switch out the short edge finder, for a long drill bit.  Sounds complex, maybe but it is super easy.  Just try to do something and why the stuff is there becomes obvious.

Mills can also "rout" metal with precision, and they can also use boring heads, to make perfect holes anywhere.  I think it is the mill that they say can make any other tool, or object.  Though lathes also have some super powers.

Depending on where you live, you can often find them for free.  I have been offered free mills on two occasions.  People just want them moved.  On the other hand, you can do most of the actual woodworking drilling with a small drill press one can walk around the shop, and cost maybe 30 dollars second hand.  Any time one can't drill something with the small drill, one can normally make a jig to drill with a hand drill.