After seeing blondihacks use a tilting milling table in a relatively recent video, I realized that there are a bunch of setups that would be easier with a tilting table. When Vevor (via their ebay store, ganfeii1_4) listed their 10"x7" table at a small discount ($105), I went for it.
I was a little annoyed because it has 12mm T-slots and my mill uses 14mm slots, but then I realized that I have a 12mm T-nut set with the mini-mill.
It took some fettling to finish. There was one particular ding on the bottom that particularly needed some work:
A parallel rocked when set across that ding, so I had to file it out without mangling the rest of the bottom.
At that price point it didn’t surprise me that it had lots of unfinished corners for me to carefully file down. I also tore it down, removed the grease and old oil, and re-oiled it with anti-corrosion oil. It came with no grease on the worm, so I added lithium grease to the worm and ran it back and forth; a great improvement.
I wondered how flat the working surface really was. I blued it with prussian blue and lightly ran a medium flat stone in circles across it, not enough to touch much of the surface, just enough to look for untouched areas. It wasn’t too bad:
Then it took me about 15 minutes to clean up all that prussian blue (ugh). I oiled it up with light oil and stoned it well with my fine stone for a minute. That made it clear that the surface wasn’t completely flat, but at this point it’s close enough for any work I want to do.
The fact that it uses the same T-slot size as my mini-mill means that I can use the mini-mill vice for setups in it, for cases where I don’t want to clamp parts down to the table directly.
I’d be annoyed if I’d spent double the money, but for what I spent I’m satisfied.
