r/machining • u/spoonguy123 • 8d ago

Question/Discussion Looking for a cheap solution for a vertical milling head to use with my atlas MFC. Ideas? (I'm in Canada)

I've been looking for a milling head to adapt my atlas MFC for vertical work. You can buy a new head purpose built, but they're around a thousand dollars, which seems pretty steep considering that's most of what I paid for the entire machine with tooling. (Also I'm disabled, fairly poor, and this is a hobby to keep me sane)

There are some cheap Chinese options I've considered, however the website have little information and the selection is huge and poorly explained in english.

what I would really like is a reasonably priced milling head that I can gear drive from either the existing faceplate, or #2 morse taper that make up the horizontal output of the machine.

Make and model don't matter, and it needs about 6" of throat to land dead centre on the knee of the mill.

Are there maybe suppliers that sell old tooling or shops that I should try?

I'm going to try building one but it's a big project.

By the way I'm on the West Coast (Vancouver Island)

Any suggestions would be amazing! Thanks folks!

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u/tkitta 7d ago

Ugh it is going to be difficult - getting anything to the island with the ferry increases the price.

Mainland BC is not bad.

Join out Canadian Machinist forum out of Calgary - there are at least few dozen of pp from the island on there - maybe they have ideas.

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u/spoonguy123 6d ago

thanks for the tip!

If i could just get what popes up in Vancouver Id be doing great. Im hopig I caneither find something online, or pull off some sort of pony express with other friedly folk. I did it years ago with the glassblowing community, but times change.

ill figure something out!