Re: greetings from new member

Hi All from a new list member.

I concurr with Dan's comments re the slide bars. Many years ago I owned an
Emco Unimat SL (-Sherline sized Austrian lathe/mill - non CNC). This used 2
off 1/2"dia bars as the bedways, and about and 2 more 5/16" dia for the
cross slide ways. I eventually sold it because of spring in the bars made
it a very slow and difficult machine to get acceptable results on anything
other than aluminium. The printer bars are smaller diameter, and I suspect
will create frustration! Should be ok as aplotter though.

Some electronic racks use ball bearing tracks to slide equipment in and out,
these are solid, and might be a goer for table ways or to carry a gantry.

I currently run an EMCO CNC 5 lathe with milling head - converting it to a 2
1/2 axis machine. Bit of a come down from the 11 ton Mori-Seki / Fanuc
machine i used in teaching!

Jim Gregg
Western Australia.

At 06:18 12/05/99 -0700, you wrote:

>From: "Dan Mauch" <dmauch@...>
>
>I can save you a lot of pain. The floppy drive motors are way to weak. You
>will need stepper motors with a torque of at leats 60 oz inches. That
>coupled to a fine 20 threads per inch lead screw will give you plenty of
>power.
>If you are planning to use a those polished rods with bearing for the X axis
>then I would suggest that you check the deflection under a load. You will
>find that surprisingly little force cause deflections of .005-.010.
>I have built about tenty different cnc machoines so I think I can speak with
>some authority. My first CB drill machine used kitchen cabinet ball bearing
>draw slides. It worked fine for light duty work. See my web page at
>www.seanet.com/~dmauch for other tips and solutions.
>Dan
>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Forsyth <david@...>
>To: CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@onelist.com <CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@onelist.com>
>Date: Wednesday, May 12, 1999 3:07 AM
>Subject: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] greetings from new member
>
>
>From: "David Forsyth" <david@...>
>
>Hi all
>
>Not sure if this will get through......
>
>I've just joined since I'm busy building a 3axis minimill.
>I'm using 2 ex-dotmatrix printer mechanisms for the XY slideways,
>giving about 8 inches travel each way. I will have to build an
>overhead gantry for the Z axis. Not sure what to do for slideways
>there as yet, poking around for another dead printer.....
>
>Drives will be (at this stage) 200step/rev motors from floppy drives,
>driving 1mm pitch leadscrews (read as threaded rod from local
>hardware store :-)
>This gives a theoretical resolution of 0.005mm per step. Of course
>this is ondone a bit by the 'leadscrews', but I'll see how it goes.
>
>Z spindle will be either my old Dremel or a flexishaft driven by a
>sewing machine motor, possibly with puta controlled speed.
>
>The purpose of this machine is to produce, using CNC, various small
>parts in plastic/aluminium/brass for model trains, and to drill PC
>boards. Some parts will be molds for casting resin, some original
>items. I'm also considering injection molding.
>
>My big interest is really in programming this thing. Yeah, I
>downloaded DanCAM, and will be making my interface complatible with
>that software, but I'd really like to write my own stuff.
>
>Web searches have turned up plenty of products, but no theory on
>generating toolpaths, no sample sourcecode, nothing of interest to a
>rabid programmer >-:
>
>btw, my main CAD program is TurboCAD 5 (3d) , which I'm slowly
>getting to grips with after using TurboCAD 3.2 for MSDOS for years.
>
>
>steam and wind
>--
> David Forsyth DaForce A-T Iwr.Ru.Ac.Za
>Keeper of the listserver for South African Railways fans _|_ His
>Part time gricer, kiter, photographer, father etc etc | Way
>http://www.ru.ac.za/departments/iwr/staff/daf/index.html | Up
>
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