Mills and others

You really have to read the specs on the HF stuff. Although both mills are shown with a chuck, unless I'm mistaken, they do have at least an MT2 spindle, so they should accommodate an end mill holder.

I have a "cheap" Homier lathe that is the same as those sold by HF (although a bit longer) and I've turned some amazing pieces out on it. All it takes is a little patience and experience with the machine to overcome its short comings.

After having thought about it for a bit and considering your budget, the mini mill might not be bad. You could at least do some operations on it. I know that I don't regret getting my little made in china lathe. I actually like working on it because it's easy to chuck something up real quick and start turning. You might want to check around on ebay though, to see if you can get a deal. HF also has sales pretty often, so you might want to wait. If your budget expands a bit, you might want to check out the equipment sold by Micromark. It's pretty much the same stuff, but comes with invaluable accessories and all of their screws in the drive and compounds are true 1", rather than a rough approximation like you get with the HF models. It's not that big a deal, but with the metric conversions, you'll find yourself measuring a lot, like I do.

I had a mini mill, but didn't really get the chance to "know" it before Katrina hit. It was still sitting on the floor of my garage when I evacuated.