I’m looking to pick up a vertical knee-mill for our shop and have been looking around at used units. I’ve only ever purchased CNC machines before.
I’m looking at a Bridgeport that is rated at 1HP, is that going to be a bit anemic?
We will only be doing small jobs, metals and plastics, but never anything super aggressive. Since this will be prototypes and run manually throughput is not really that large of a concern for me.
One of the alternatives would be a (gasp) new asian unit (probably a JET).
Like I said, this is going to be used as a once in a while, prototype, fix stuff mill, not a job shop or production unit. Thoughts?
A 1hp Bridgeport should be fine in your application. I’d just want to be sure it wouldn’t ever need to be pulled into a production roll down the road. That is where you will see the 1hp being inadequate.
my dad has a midlevel jet from right when they started being outsourced, nice machine except im not at all happy with the way the head locks down, still has a bit of rotational play
This is the style of Bridgeport we used in the Machine shop/Baja Shop at RIT. The only problem we had with them was the Draw bar would strip out every so often, other then that they were great.
