The Milling Machine

In this book Gingery steps you through building your own table top sized milling machine and cutters to go with it. This is a great book for any person that would like to cast their own machine shop. Once you have completed building the milling machine, many of the tasks in Gingery's book (like hand scrapping surfaces flat) will be reduced down to a 15 minute job. This is a very versatile machine that will speed up your current working pace and allow you to tackle tasks that before would have been impossible. I would suggest that you make sure you also have Gingery's book on building a metal lathe because he uses the lathe to make many of the parts for the milling machine.

I purchased this book out of curiosity as a machine tool designer/tool designer for 36 years. I am building a retirement shop to putz around in and this looked interesting. I ended up buying almost every book in the series and find there are chat rooms and websites where people have built these machines and are using them. I cannot say enough good things about this book. I have taken parts of the instructions and adapted them to making a mill of my own design. The book sparked ideas that are still keeping me sketching and cutting metal after a year. My 4 star rating is predicated on the fact you have to learn other skills or perform other tasks to build this particular machine. That takes time, but the ingenious way this series of books is written and laid out is a 6 star effort.

I haven't built this milling machine, but I just about got started. I made the pattern for the base and then sort of forgot about it. This is not a production machine by any means but if you build it, you will certainly understand how mills work!Trevor