Recently a friend of mine Jason was downsizing to move house, and was looking to sell his CNC mill. I couldn’t resist giving it a home, especially after seeing how much effort he’d put into tweaking it over the years.

Sadly the mill was rained on pretty heavily in the recent storms that swept Sydney, and there was a fair bit of rust on various surfaces.

To start with we stripped the head off, and cleaned all the dovetail surfaces. Fine (0000 grade) steel wool, and WD40 was able to remove all the surface rust. After a few hours work we had it cleaned up and aligned again.

(Not shown is making a wood base, mounting it on the tool chest, doing the wiring, etc).

Reassembled and tramelled (the milling head made vertical), and running a quick test cut:

Loaded up with a facecutter. Not bad for a first try:

Any mill needs dozens of parts just to hold milling bits. A bit of lasercut organising later:

And running under full CNC control. The part is a simple handwheel to add to the stepper motor shafts: