Monday night I was looking at the latest Home Shop Machinist and saw a cover story about someone making new dials for his Jet mill-drill so theyd look more like Bridgeport dials. (This involved designing a machine to engrave the new dials, designing another machine to resharpen carbide engraving tools to needle sharp points, etc. People in HSM often go overboard in cover articles, perhaps to get to be cover articles).

I paid little attention to the modification story, but I was intrigued by the mill-drill itself. I have a Harbor Freight mini-mill (the one with the tiltable column) that I bought in 2017. It's given me good service and I love using it for drilling, but its low power and small capacity have sometimes been a trial.

For example, when I was restoring my South Bend shaper, I had to make a new gib for the shaper ram out of phosphor bronze. The SB gib is a foot long, and that's the exact length of the table on the mini-mill. So milling the edges of the gib was a mess and cutting oil grooves in it was even worse. I had to keep unclamping the work and moving it on the table, because a one-foot table gives you much less then a foot of table TRAVEL, and a table as long as the work means you can't clamp it on both ends at the same time.?

The thing that saved me on that shaper gib job was that it works fine and will never be seen by human eyes until after I'm dead. But if that had been practically anything else, I would've has to scrap the part (probably several? times), in metal that cost $100/square foot.? Also, even on the lower speed setting, this mini-mill doesn’t have much power.

But the mill-drill in that story had twice as long a table and more capacity in every area,? plus a 2 HP motor. (With real American horses, not Chinese horses). So I looked on ebay to see what they sell for and discovered that the Grizzly equivalent is for sale right across the river in Brooklyn right now, for a used price similar to what I paid for my mini-mill in 2017.

What do people think of this? I know there's criticism of round-columned mill-drills because the head can move from side to side when changing height but I could figure out ways around that, and I'd much rather have that problem than to try to make something more rigid or more powerful then it was designed to be.

?I was originally hesitant about the weight of the thing since I lived by myself and drive a VW GTI. But it looks like it can break down into pieces, and I could make several trips.

I'm sick with a cold, so I'm not visiting the seller immediately, but probably will later this week.

Mike Taglieri?