Just for a point of reference: I bought my mill with very little wear for $500 in south jersey. It's a 1967 step pulley machine. Had no frills or tooling but was almost 100% complete. (missing quill handle, fine adjust wheel) and needed routine maintenance.
If this helps, I asked my son to skip school that day. We towed a low u-haul trailer behind our F150, and I brought a lot of tools, an automotive floor jack, and a HF engine hoist. We disassembled the mill in place until all we had left was the column. Took about 4 or 5 hours. We had the 1.5 ton engine hoist whose base legs weren't wide enough to straddle the column. That was the only real difficulty. Had I sprung for the heavier duty engine hoist, that would have worked better.
Note: We didn't do a complete disassembly, only broke the mill into manageable components. I was unable to move the ram for example. I pulled the motor, separated the drive pull covers from the head, removed the head, and then took off the ram and turret as a single component. Really wasn't that heavy as I recall. Only slight issue is that we used a lifting eye, which, because I couldn't move the ram, wasn't near the center of gravity.
Other trick I used was, I brought lifting eyes that threaded into tee nuts in the table slots. I had a bit of chain and made a bridle so that we could remove the table. Again, not being able to get the engine hoist under the mill, we slid the table off onto a rubbermaid cart (that I brought for the purpose) then grabbed the table from there.
In retrospect, fork lifts etc are all the best way to move these. I suspect part of the reason this went so cheap was because the seller didn't want to assist with the move and buyers couldn't/wouldn't do what my son and I did.
Lessons learned:
1) Picking up the column is tricky without an engine hoist or gantry crane that can straddle the base. If we had that, we could have knocked several hours off the move.
2) We did borrow cribbing to support the column. We kinda just tipped the column back and forth, slipping in 2X lumber until the base was high enough to clear the engine hoist's legs. I had some big crow bars which helped.
3) Sliding the mill on the trailer was our last hurdle. I needed a come along. Fortunately, my high schooler was a varsity defensive lineman/rugby player who just pushed the 800lb column across the steel trailer bed. Not sure what I would have done without him.
Really, all the equipment there was well used. They had a Taiwanese mill with horrible sounding bearings, Not sure how they could use it without hearing protection. Apparently the shop owner was quite elderly and must have just let the equipment deteriorate.
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