Milling Machine?

    Any one know about the Midas 1220 LTD 3 in 1 combo mill, drill, lathe? I know stand alone milling machine & stand alone lathe would be the best, but space & my wallet won't let me.

I have one, it will do more than my ability.  I built a good solid frame and anchored it to the floor well.  I have cut  a lot of keyways on shafts, made a couple of punches, but I bought it to make some specific stainless pieces and it worked well for that.  It won't do any heavy stuff but I'm no machinest.  Mine is the older style, works well for replacing tractor brakes as shown.  I also purchased the heavy duty vise with it.

One of those "too good to be true" items from what I've heard.Butch is a guy with good charactor and if he says No Go then you can take it to the bank.

Unsure of what the price is but i bought a nice Nichemori 15"X60" gap bed lathe for $500, and the Bridgport mill for the same price. I also bought a South Bend 9"X 48" for $500, yes they take up room but they will do just about anything. For drill work I found a decent drillpress (import Enco) after buying one from Harbor Freight that ended up being real inacurate, but after replacing spindle and chuck it will hold some tolerance now.

Yup Allen, machine tools are not one bit differant than any other man toy. There will always be bigger, better, cooler, newer, or just plain more different ones to purchase and play,, oops, work with. We are getting along fine at the moment with a 20x 60 Summit lathe and a 9x49 Bridgeport copy from Tiawan but I have to stay away from the machine tool classifieds, LOL As for "good enough" parts and good enough machine tools, the old machinist who broke me in said make every part, no matter how simple in function or fit,  as if it was a critical part. Then when you need to make a precise part you will find it easy to maintain tolorances. 

Edited by Butch(OH) - 03 Jan 2011 at 7:28am

Buy a lathe. I have an old flat belt South Bend and when I went to pick it up I found a mill vise that went with it. Now I have a horizontal boring mill of sorts and a 17"x 5' lathe.m The first thing I did was clamped a piece of round stock in the mill vise and put an old 1 1/4 " endmill in the chuck and made me a 1/2 in square drive key for my 4 jaw chuck.

The other thing you need to be aware of - is the machine single or three phase?  If its three phase and you don't have it into your building you are going to have to get a phase converter or retrofit the machine with a single phase motor.

Solving 3-phase power isn't a difficult or expensive problem, nor is powering a 480v three-phase motor from 240v single-phase mains.  It DOES, however, reduce the demand on machines that need such power, so the price on 480v 3ph machines tends to be pretty low.

Installing a single-phase motor on a three-phase machine is a quick-and-dirty method for getting it to run on single-phase power, but having a 3-phase motor on the machine assures that the machine will not overheat from repeated starts (like when threading or plug-reversing), and it also greatly reduces the ripple found on a cutting surface resulting from motor hum.

In 1992, I bought my 1942 Monarch 10EE lathe and 1953 Bridgeport J-head mill at a GSA auction at the Rock Island Arsenal.  The Monarch cost me $750.  The mill cost me $400.  A year later, I purchased a Johannsen radial drill for $450, and drove to Green Bay (5hrs or so) to get it.  My Milwaukee #2 horizontal set me back $200, the Pratt & Whitney shaper was GIVEN to me (great for putting splines on shafts and cutting gears).  I bought a Brown & Sharpe #2 surface grinder for $150, and a Lodge & Shipley 24" x 120" lathe for $300.

Every one of these, with exception of the L&S's bed, were moved using my '88 Jeep Cherokee and a tandem-axle car hauler... and every one of 'em is a three-phase machine.  When I started with the lathe and mill, I built a rotary phase converter using an orphaned special-purpose 10hp motor and some contactors, capacitors, and junk I had laying around.  I then started buying surplus variable frequency drives, and fitting them to my machines... with a gross cost of under $120 per machine, they all run from single-phase power, but have variable-speed 3-phase drive now, and they're quieter and smoother than the manufacturers ever dreamed.  Ironically, the Monarch is still running off the rotary converter... it was built from the git-go with a Ward-Leonard variable armature/variable field motor-generator drive arrangement, so from the first day I fired it up, it had full variable speed, electrodynamic braking, and the legendary Monarch 10EE precision and cut quality.

Our society is amidst, and hopefully the end of a declination in manufacturing.  The surplus production machines we find these days, were made anytime from the 1890's all the way up to the early '60's, and in some cases, the mid '90's.  Even after a half-a-century of industrial operation, these metal-eating machines are more capable, even in a worn-out state, than the BEST of brand new imported machines.  Dollar for dollar, an imported lathe, mill, or combination machine is an absolute rip-off compared to buying ex-industrial equipment.  Even the lighter commercial and educational grade machines (South Bend, Clausing, etc) stomp daisies all around Enco, Grizzly, and JET.

So-called 'consumer-grade' tools feature low-quality castings poured from whatever-we-had-lying-around mixtures if iron and steel... poured into shoddily tamped molds made of dirty, unmetered sand, lifted out as soon as they were cool enough to be lifted.  What sprues and flashing are not knocked off with a hammer, are painted over.  Surface machining is done in low tolerance, so parts have plenty of slop-room to permit easy assembly, and they're pinned or bolted together with cheap hardware.  They're not hand-fitted for precision or they're not unit-ground for trueness... they're slapped together, oftentimes not even properly torqued, or with mating surfaces still covered with mask and paint, before being hosed down with oily wax, wrapped in plastic and shoved in a remanufactured cardboard box.  Handles are plated without proper etching (looks good now, will peel and cut your hands open later), but fortunately, they're not threaded well, and the hubs are made of lousy metal, so they'll fall out, and you'll wind up welding a piece of re-bar in it's place.  While it is possible to work the machines over to 'get good tolerances' in a resulting workpiece, the trade-off is in your time, patience, and many pieces thrown in the scrap bin. 

What these machines DO to an excellent job of, is parting budding machinists (amateur and professional) of a good chunk of wallet, while at the same time causing frustration that invariably causes them to give up and walk away.  Fifteen years ago, that's where I was.  I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but if you're bound-and-determined to do so, remember what I've noted here, so that when you're faced with those frustrations, you realize that what you're getting out of the machine, is NOT normal, and the problems you're having, while maybe partially a lack of skill or experience on your end, is mostly attributed to poor excuse for machine.

Edited by DaveKamp - 08 Jan 2011 at 7:02am

There's many people out there who, with a 10 acre lot, would opt to spend good money on one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/MTD-13AA625P004-50-Inch-Briggs-Stratton/dp/B001B1N8O2

When they could have one of these:

http://springfieldil.craigslist.org/grd/2115260987.html
http://louisville.craigslist.org/grd/2088061541.html
http://southbend.craigslist.org/grd/2090931419.html

But I'm sure there's people out there who would.

I'm sure there's some who would come up with a reason to buy This:
http://www.harborfreight.com/two-speed-variable-bench-mill-drill-machine-44991.html

Or this:
http://machinerydistributors.com/m1007.htm

Or even this:
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_SPM1348281101P?sid=IDx20101019x00001a&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=SPM1348281101

When they could have :
http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/machinery-sale-wanted/reconditioned-bridgeport-f-s-216992/

or:
http://fortwayne.craigslist.org/tls/2107826825.html

or:
http://southbend.craigslist.org/grd/2136436779.html

or:
http://kalamazoo.craigslist.org/tls/2151290016.html

You simply cannot beat the value of surplus industrial machines.  There's merit in the argument of space, but I don't know ANY 'tractor enthusiasts' that can't come up with enough space for a floor-standing drill press.  That being the case, throw the drill press away, and move in a real machine.  As for them being large and heavy, you can't make cuts in large workpieces, if they don't fit.