A Long Absence and a New Machine

I must once again apologize for a long absence from this blog... between work and some other things going on, I haven't spent too much time working on any of my garage projects.

The one bit of news it that almost immediately after starting to purchase the parts for my Spectralight mill upgrade, I found the hobby mill of my dreams on Craigslist for a good price: a Light Machine Benchman MX (specifically a BXT-4021). For those that aren't familiar with the Benchman mills, they were the industrial line from Light Machines, and a very distant relative to the STEM style mills like my other machine. Cool features of the Benchman MX:

• One piece composite (i.e. similar to epoxy granite) base/column
• Preloaded ground ballscrews for all axes
• Servo motor control for all axes
• Recirculating ball bearing linear rails for all the axes 
• 2 hp AC servo motor for spindle (big power for a small mill, ability to rigid tap)
• Rapids of 200 ipm (a little faster than the Spectralights 12 ipm...)
• Full enclosure
• On my machine, the optional 7500 rpm spindle speed
• And finally, a 20 position automatic tool changer

 The work envelope of the machine isn't too much bigger than the Spectralight, but everything is substantially bigger and beefier. Here's the machine today:

Benchman As It Stands Today

The kicker (and why the machine was cheap) is that the interface card for the computer was missing, along with any software. I did some research on this, and these cards, if you can find them (machine was from 1998), are in the thousands of dollars to replace. I found a much better alternative, a interface card combo from Mesa Electronics, that will control this thing in the end.

That's it for today. I've got some catching up on the progress here, so expect a few more posts in the coming days to get to where the project is currently.