The lathe goes in the left back corner and the mill goes to the right. The first 12 feet of the floor is flat to make it easy to level machine tools. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/rodent.gif" alt="" />

Now you're just braggin'

At this point its dreaming <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/rodent.gif" alt="" /> I still need to buy a lath and a mill...

Someday.

I'm saving my pennies for one of those cnc machining centers with the big glass self closing window in front, so you can watch the nice machine do it all for you after you put in the codes.

Way back when the Pontiac Fiero was brand new, the car had a brand new system of affixing the brand new plastic body panels. They used a cnc machine to face and drill the unibody's plastic mounting pads for the exterior body panel's attaching hardware. It could change it's own tooling, detect dull tooling and change it out, and face and drill and tap all the pads at once. I fell in love right there. I had been auditing a high school shop class in machine work (the counselor would not let me take shop in high school for credit - "Shop" was plebian, and I was destined for greater things, you see - pah...) and the most tedious part was setup and tool changes. I was there to see the shavings curl off in one clean spiral and have my part appear from where it was hidden inside that chunk of steel.

A few jobs ago I bought a pair of CNC mills with tool turrets that held 20 plus tools. I set them up to run 24 , 7 with bar stock feeders and tool monitoring. They made parts for CNC mills and lathes. I think I spent about $600,000.

There are several companies that make CNC retrofits for standard mills. Anilam is one. I designed the feedback devices for the table.

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Ridge Beam up

Roof on

Decking

A few new pics.