Boring heads for the mill

[TomG]

Dan,

I would recommend getting the larger head. It will have much more useful range than the small one with little penalty for it's additional size. Criterion makes excellent boring heads and if you can afford it, a boring and facing head will allow you to not only bore a hole, but face the bottom of it as well.

I would not recommend using replaceable inserts in a boring head. Preventing chatter is always a challenge when boring and the best way to do that is to use razor sharp tooling with small nose radii. Boring bars with brazed inserts will fill that requirement, or better yet, high speed steel. Carbide tooling is almost never appropriate for the hobby machinist.

Tom