Router Mill for Aluminum (Poor Man's Milling Machine)

[scorch]

After hand working a bunch of sand cast parts for my Gingery lathe I decided there must be a better way. So I built up a little mill consisting of a wood frame, cross slide vice and standard router for preparing the surface of cast aluminum parts.

Here is a link to a

.

Assembled Mill:

Router Removed (exposing cross slide vice):

Closeup with workpiece shown through router hole:



EDIT: Added details below this line.

One of the comments Wmrra13 made below made me think of some additional details that might be interesting.

The router was mounted to a ring of aluminum which was in turn bolted to piece of wood that made up the top of the router mill. The ring of aluminum was made from the bottom of a nonstick aluminum frying pan. In the picture below the top plate of the mill is leaning against the back wall so you can see the black, non-stick (Teflon) coated, side of the frying pan.


I used a high speed high helix bit specifically designed for high speed aluminum machining for most of my cuts but I also used regular wood cutting bits if I needed a special feature like inside corner rounded.

I usually sprayed the work piece with WD-40 to prevent the chips from sticking to the bit. The WD-40 seemed to work well for that application.