Dave, you have apoint there. I'm speaking now strictly as an amateur CNC user. Of course, making one or a couple of parts is much quicker manually than using CNC. But there are lots of parts you couldn't possibly make by hand, and this is where CNC comes in on the hobbyist level. Some examples:
Imagine fabricating spheric hollow surfaces with a radius of, say, about 6 meters, in a 16 inch cast iron blank, with a precision in radius of about 1 mm. I needed these for mirror and lens grinding. How would you turn something like this on a purely manual lathe? Install a radius bar across the house? Another example: milling spur or other gears. I tried to make a single odd gear for my change gear set on its own machine. I have a wonderful little high precision dividing head. I had to turn the crank wheel some odd numbers of some degrees and umpteen minutes after each cut, and after the tenth I made a minute error so the blank was lost. Then I decided to set up a CNC system first, and soon made drawers full of perfect gears in short time. I repeated this on the large mill to make change gears in modulus 2 for my large lathe too. There would have been no way to do this, especially not in reasonable time, without digital control. A third example: I was making printed circuit boards for the stepper units of the 3 axis minimill I am building. I made the boards with eagle, etched them and had them drilled within about a minute. 3 times 300 holes would take a long time positioning and drilling by hand.... You don't have to be a professional to profitably use a CNC system, and I'm glad there is something like LinuxCNC or EMC2, as you like. Peter Blodow dave schrieb: > For a one-off that is orthogonal a manual machine may be the fastest. > However, as soon as one needs another part, or a taper, or a really > good finish then quick programs still beat manual. > > May be this just illustrates my lack of skill, but if so, so be it. ;-) > > > Dave > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
