Thread: What hope do we have?

Well ,Ken you are right no fun and no skill involved at all ,you could train the village idiot to program a CNC machine.

Kev.

Originally Posted by Woodlee

Well ,Ken you are right no fun and no skill involved at all ,you could train the village idiot to program a CNC machine.

Kev.

Hi Kev,

Can you send that villiage idiot around here maybe he can teach me!

I don't have the cnc conversion finished, but thought I might try and learn a bit of G code, so I've been doing some reading... and getting nowhere... maybe it will start making more sense when I finally get the machine is running.

Ken, when you finally get that shed/workshop built, power points and lights wired, benches and work tables designed built and installed, the machine moved in, the VFD wiring done, the machine setup and tuning completed, sourced the raw materials and tooling you need... and on it goes, how much more fun do you need...

In all seriousness, there are some things that you can do with CNC that just aren't possible with a manual only control. I think you still really need to know a lot about machining to get anywhere with cnc.

Regards
Ray

I think that is going to be the hardest part for me to. It's pretty strait forward fitting the machine out, but coming up with G codes without crashing it is going to take some study and work.

Dave

Originally Posted by Woodlee

Well ,Ken you are right no fun and no skill involved at all ,you could train the village idiot to program a CNC machine.

Kev.

huh, sorry kev but that is a pretty narrow minded view to take..

Originally Posted by neksmerj

All you need is a machining centre. Your missus probably has one already in the spare room, disguised as a sewing machine.

Dammit, here I was thinking I'd found a thread on how to convert a sewing machine into a CNC machine...

lol Sure any idiot can write G code just like any idiot can write HTML, its amazing how much bad code there is out there. Bad HTML doesn't normally break cutters or leave a nice groove in your table.
Safe zones in the software must truly be a PITA on a mill(assuming they use them at all?
With a machine like the one in the video, would the spindle be driven all the time by a stepper motor(not sure stepper motor is the right term but you get what I mean) or would there be a drive motor and a positioning motor(for the milling work)?

Stuart

Originally Posted by .RC.

huh, sorry kev but that is a pretty narrow minded view to take..

Well that's my opinion and you are entitled to it.

Seriously CNC is good for production work ,but I don't really see a use for one off jobs or home hobby work .
Possibly a CNC gantry router would be ok ,but not a full sized mill .
CNC would be useless for me as my experience here is nothing but trouble with CNC machines because of the high humidity .
At work we have a Kondia CNC mill , and it spends more time being repaired than doing any actual work .It should have been put in an air-conditioned environment and had a much better filter dryer system on the air conrols.Great when you get halfway through a job and the thing sh*ts itself and then takes weeks to get it going again only to spit the dummy a bit further into the job.In the last 26 months it's done absolutely nothing .
But who am to tell a big Govt dept what to do with their stuff ,seeing as the dept is full of 5 min experts .

I certainly won't be going down the CNC track at any time ,the expense is way over what I could afford including air con for the workshop, The crashes are usually much more expensive than those on a manual machine.On a manual you may bust a cutter , but on the other side it could lead to a big repair job on the spindle or repairing a large canyon in the table.I would cetainly be one of the "crash test machinists " it's been many years since I've had any thing to do with CNC and things have changed since I was in Trade School .
Not one employer I have ever worked with since then had CNC machinery in thier tool rooms or maintenance machine shops apart from the production side of things.

Whilst I respect those who have made a decision to convert thier machines , I personally would rather be using my machine and making stuff than spending time ,
modifying and changing it . Just my way of looking at it.

Kev

Originally Posted by Woodlee

The crashes are usually much more expensive than those on a manual machine.

Kev,
Why would there be any crashes? If I recall correctly, "you could train the village idiot to program a CNC machine".

Stuart

Like to see this done on a manual machine

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsmiIeAkE-o]YouTube - Matsuura Maxia: V8 Engine Block Machined From Solid[/ame]

Anyone know what its doing around the 7 minute mark? Just showing off?

Stuart

Ah the little red hen always got it wrong, The sky wont fall in. Sure a lot of jobs come and go. My trade died, started post WW2 and is now at the end. But thats not new.
The Industrial revolution in the UK was a couple of hundred years back. They smashed machinary cos the sky was falling in. Sky is still up there and we aint that bad off. We just got to use what the machine doesnt have, the old noggin.

Originally Posted by Stustoys

Anyone know what its doing around the 7 minute mark? Just showing off?

Stuart

At a guess I would say it is finish machining the Bores.

I saw a link to that last year from someone. I think like pipe clay that it is boring, maybe a ball nose end mill?

Dave

Impressive demo, but why would you machine an engine block from one solid block of material ? (I suspect its not even a full size engine block but a miniature just for the demo )
Much cheaper to cast it the traditional way and machine it to size, if you are making any more than one for a demo .

How do you reckon we did it before CNC?
Built the titanic ? The big railway guns used in WW1 and WW2 , the big steam driven locos , the warbirds that helped defeat our enemies during the big conflicts , all designed ,manufactured and operated with out a computer in sight and manufactured in vast numbers .
I worked in a big tool room in SA during my apprenticeship and for a few years after that , we had five or six Keller mills , we used a pattern of what we wanted to make from steel and a tracer stylus followed the pattern ,the machines were not CNC controlled ,but hydraulic actuated , there was no involvement at all with computers ,just a skilled tradesman operator .
The tooling was for pressing roof panels , bonnet panels , mud guards and doors panels etc all done with out the aid of CNC machines.
We made some very complex shapes and profiles using the Kellers, the end results, the metal panels and components for motor vehicles .One such vehicle was the Leyland P76 ,whilst not a pretty vehicle ,the tooling was made in Australia .Also Holdens and Fords of the same era all had some of the tooling made at our tool room.

Kev.