Sherline Mill - Thoughts?

Brock Cutlery

Brock Cutlery

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Jan 10, 2015
Messages
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Does anyone have any experience with a Sherline mill vs. the little red Harbor Freight mill?
Is it too light weight for knife making?

Advice appreciated!
 
i've never heard of sherline, so i watched a couple of vids. i think the harbor freight is a better piece of equipment than the sherline. the HF has a quill, and the tooling change seems to be a pain on the sherline.
 
and not to mention the sherline costs twice as much from the adds i saw. you can buy a lot of tooling for $600.
 
My friend had a sherline. He used it mostly with aluminum and delrin. I. Ever saw him work a piece of steel with it other than drilling. Cute little bugger. Not to make the HF jealous, it is cute as well. If you are looking to mill steel, and expect good, repeatable results, the minimum is a big benchtop mill. I have a HF geared head mill that produces great results, but even at 800 lbs and everything locked down, I am limited to quite light cuts in steel and slow feed rates. The baby HF mill could not even come close to do what the gear head could do. I finally got tired of taking an hour to do a ten minute job and picked up a "small" knee mill.
 
Jonathans said:
My friend had a sherline. He used it mostly with aluminum and delrin. I. Ever saw him work a piece of steel with it other than drilling. Cute little bugger. Not to make the HF jealous, it is cute as well. If you are looking to mill steel, and expect good, repeatable results, the minimum is a big benchtop mill. I have a HF geared head mill that produces great results, but even at 800 lbs and everything locked down, I am limited to quite light cuts in steel and slow feed rates. The baby HF mill could not even come close to do what the gear head could do. I finally got tired of taking an hour to do a ten minute job and picked up a "small" knee mill.
Click to expand...

That's what I wanted to know. I have the little red HF mill, and before I start investing to much in it, I want to get something that will do what I want to do.
A bridgeport is just too much right now. I think I'm going to go with a Rong Fu ish mill then. Thanks for the feedback all.
 
The Sherline is a much better mill than what HF offers. Its in the tolerance and backlash is where you'll see the difference. As stated above, the little bench top mills aren't meant to be used to hog steel. They do quite well at slotting guards and the like. Buy a mill to suite the work you do.

We upgraded our Sherline making it a 3 axis cnc machine with a ten thousand RPM spindle speed along with high speed teflon coated screws and a better anti backlash system. We use this little machine to do our high speed etching and marking. It is a very fast and accurate machine. Like in anything you get what you pay for. There is no cheap way to owning a quality milling machine. [video]https://youtu.be/fZYZGqjB2us[/video]
 
Fred.Rowe said:
The Sherline is a much better mill than what HF offers. Its in the tolerance and backlash is where you'll see the difference. As stated above, the little bench top mills aren't meant to be used to hog steel. They do quite well at slotting guards and the like. Buy a mill to suite the work you do.

We upgraded our Sherline making it a 3 axis cnc machine with a ten thousand RPM spindle speed along with high speed teflon coated screws and a better anti backlash system. We use this little machine to do our high speed etching and marking. It is a very fast and accurate machine. Like in anything you get what you pay for. There is no cheap way to owning a quality milling machine. [video]https://youtu.be/fZYZGqjB2us[/video]
Click to expand...

Thanks Fred. Interesting video. Some day I might do engraving that way.
 
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