Brutus - my G3102 mill

When I bought a mill I decided to go with the Grizzly G3102. It is if a class of mills commonly referred to as a 6x26 knee mills. It has six inches of X travel and 26 inches of Y travel. This class of inport mills was loosly inspired by the earlier Clausing 8250 and Rockwell 21-100.

Because of the physical location of my shop a larger mill, like a used Bridgeport was not an option. The 3102 is nice in that it is a large mill for a hobbiest but is still small enough that one person can move it arround the by themselves, and move it between locations with nothing more than an engine hoist and a truck. That is critical in a small shop.

All in all 3 years in I am happy with the purchase, but in retrospect I probably would buy a slightly smaller X3 if I had it to do over again.

These pages document picking up my own G3102 mill.

Over on benchtest.com there is a nice writeup on benchtest.com on moving and setting up his G3103. (That is the G3102 with the optional power feed). He also has very solid writeups on how he setup and trued his mill, and then later went back and rebuilt it.

So I figured if I quickly boot strapped my mill to CNC with quick to build wooden parts, I could then use the newly CNCed mill to machine metal replacements.

For my design I chose to use stepper motors and belts so I could continue to use the handles for manual milling. Ball screws have much less backlash – but they reuqire the holding torque of the attached motor. Since I almost never use the mill in manual mode so my plans now are to upgrade to a ballscrew design. If you are planning a CNC upgrade I strongly suggest you go with a non manual, servos and ballscrew, design.