Milling for Home Machinists Paperback – Illustrated, 1 June 2012

I will be using often

A good introduction to milling

At first blush, the reviews of this book appear very mediocre. But if you actually read them, the main complaints are that this book is too advanced for the absolute beginner, the writing style is hard to follow and the book is just reprinted material from the practice series. I agree with all of those sentiments, however, Mr. Halls work is outstanding. Has anyone even tried any of the projects in this book? I'm a hobbyist who took a machine shop class a few years ago, so I have the basics. I think having basic instruction prior to this book is a really good idea because you do need some understanding of how the equipment works before using it. Luckily there are a ton of videos out there on youtube to get one started.My personal feeling is that the writing style is a bit hard to follow owning to Mr. Hall being located in the UK, but not impossible. The projects are also written in metric, so it can be an added challenge if you have an Imperial machine and Imperial cutters/tooling, but you can do some conversions of the plans ahead of beginning. It should also be noted that a lathe is needed for some of the work in this book, but I suppose it's assumed you'd get one well before buying a mill (King of the shop tools, and all that.)I built the boring head outlined in this book. I have not built the dividing head yet, so I marked out the dial using a technique Mr. Hall describes in Practice Series #37. The result was a very high quality tool that will be around a lot longer than I will be.To sum up, the projects in this book are useful items designed to improve your skills with each project becoming more complicated. Materials and sizing are listed in British designations and metric, plans are well illustrated and not difficult to follow. Certainly for the cost, it's well worth having. Mr. Hall has a website with a lot of information and plans. You can get a feel for his writing style there.Good luck with your projects!

If you have a mini-mill for hobby work, this is a great book to get you started

This must have been written by someone that does not speak English. The grammar is so poor, that it hard to understand many of the sentences.as well the drawings are primitive and poorly numbered. there is no flow in the book and its hard to make sense of most of the drawings as they lake sufficient detail to reproduceDO NOT BUY