My machining hobby keeps being expensive. E.g. I’m thinking about learning rotary broaching, and the absolute cheapest rotary broaches I find are $50 for just the cutting bit. Those are the ones for hobbists. A single cutting bit can easily be over $200.
I’ve been wanting to cut some outside radii on the manual mill, and that’s a right pain. I finally decided that most of my use cases so far are not high precision, so instead of trying to talk myself into spending $700 shipped for a reasonably good horizontal/vertical rotary table, I went cheap. So cheap that I won’t cry if in five years I want to replace it with a better one. Really cheap. My expectations were appropriately low.
I don’t know how they sell this thing — shipped expeditiously — for $220. it shipped Monday, arrived today. It has about 20’ of backlash, and while I didn’t spend a lot of time measuring it, I did a quick sweep with a tenths indicator and it was within about a thou across the whole table — under .03mm. That’s pretty close to the limit of what I can repeatedly control quill travel on the mill anyway.
My main complaint is that the index wheel locks with a set screw but has no friction spring in it. I can put the handwheel and index wheel on the lathe and cut a slot, and then put a bit of spring steel in to make a friction spring, if I want.
The T-slots take the same T-nuts as my mill table, so I can use my existing hold-downs.
I haven’t tested runout on the MT3 in the middle, but I mostly don’t even care, since really for vertical use I have a dividing head that I’m more likely to use. The only actual use I currently have in mind for it is horizontal; vertical might someday come in handy if I need to fix something odd-shaped to it.
I’m unreasonable happy about this.