Milly's First Run

One of the great things about the holidays is that there's a whole lot of really fun things to do. The downside - as with any holiday - is there's more to do than time to do it! We had a really great Christmas, and hope you and your's did too, and a Happy New Year to you :-)

With Milly the new Mill firmly ensconced in the garage Build Space we had to spend some time rearranging and organizing the Build Space, and so that was a task duly accomplished today. With a little bit of time left over, we decided to give Milly a test run. It took a while to figure out the whole drawbar/collet thing, but then again this whole Mill-thing is a learning process for us. We eventually mounted up a collet with a half-inch end mill, and selected a sacrificial target - an off-cut of UHMW we've had sitting around for years, and bolted it down. Click back after viewing an image.

After a couple of minutes of cranking handles - we haven't set up the CNC PC yet, we have our first ever self-milled part produced in our own Build Space! Not a great photo, so let's go to Macro Mode.

Ta-daa! True, it's pretty rough, but none-the-less we did that with our own hands, on our own mill. Milly rocks :-) [Not literally though - that would be unsafe - Ed]

As you can see, we've gotten somewhat organized, with our meagre selection of tooling up on the pegboard ... as time goes by that board is probably going to become filled with handy implements, but hey: you've got to start somewhere!