Re: re:hand jive

Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 00:13:29 -0800
From: "Darrell" <dgehlsen@...> wrote:-

>Well when milling or turning, I use CNC. For manual I have a forge and
>anvil. You can do precision one off work on both systems,
>Darrell

Wow Darrell, that's amazing
I do a LOT of one off stuff for a living.
I'm really jealous, never, ever, managed to get close to a bearing fit
using my old forge.
In fact I've converted it into a bar-B-Q.
From past and practical experience I've found that a tolerance of plus or
minus a zip code is plenty good enough for a steak.

[posted with a big grin <BG> ]

Serious and a true story:-
A while a go I was sent a job by a largish company who had all the latest
machines. These were 25 shafts that had a circlip groove and step machine
into them in the wrong place
Fortunately they were where it didn't matter, and just required new groves
and steps machining in.
I did this, returned the job, thanked them and asked why did I get the job
when they had all this fancy gear.
The shop foreman waved his arms and said "We haven't got anything with hand
wheels "
I asked why didn't they do it on a CNC, it would only be about 10 lines of
code.
His answer was "Why break a machine down to correct a mistake when its now
making the right parts?" This always stuck with me and in fact the company
went out and bought a S/H lathe.

CNC is very nice and I am all for it but don't get to thinking that it's
the total answer. Examine your work load carefully before making any
decisions to go to full CNC. As someone on this group said when you are
jogging you are in manual, true but you can only jog in one axis at a time.
On a miller this doesn't seem too bad but on a lathe you are always doing
tapers, chamfers etc.
If you have the work and a back up manual machine then go for it. If you
are down to one machine, look carefully.
--

Regards,
John Stevenson
Nottingham, England