[Espeefan]

Lou, for most of the parts I've been making for my trucks, I've been running the X about 6" max, and on the Y, around 2" to 3". On the Z axis, well I usually don't need that much travel, but when I use my Albrecht drill chuck, I find that I am glad to have the 9" of travel that I do. Mostly for the throat opening. The chuck itself takes away about 5" of my Z axis height, and for the most part it's never been a problem, but having that extra room is a plus, if only because you don't need move the table (the work piece) out from under the spindle to switch from the drill chuck to a collet, or vise versa. There was one job where I had to cut a drill bit shank shorter in order to get it into my chuck, and still have the clearance to slide the work under the spindle, without the drill bit hitting an edge, but there are sometimes ways around that too. You can get away with a center cut end mill to drill a hole, as long as depth isn't a problem, or grab a collet to fit the drill bit, assuming you have a larger drill bit. But, yes, there are times when I'm glad I've got that much throat opening, and Z axis travel.

I should also note that when you start drilling holes in frame rails, it's nice to have a lot of X axis travel. Less work piece re-positioning that way, and as another bonus, having more X axis travel can sometimes mean you don't have to remove your vise (which you just indicated and squared up) to maching something you can't fit into the vise. You can get away with using the last 3" to 6" of X axis table travel, to the side of the vise, instead. Or run two different vises. You'll never really have enough table travel. It's imposible!

One last thing I will mention is probably pretty common stuff, but another selling point for me, and my mill, was that it used an R8 spindle. Best thing about that is any tooling I buy for my mini-mill, will someday carry over to a larger machine, if I ever buy something bigger. So I bought the best drill chuck I could, and some nicer collets. That's more of an investment. Buy it once, and I can always run it on a Bridgeport.