Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] What is everyone doing, building, wanting to learn?

At 08:13 PM 01/05/2001 -0700, you wrote:

>I was just reviewing past messages and it is amazing. We have almost 1000
>people on this list and there are only about 10 of us that regularly say
>things and probably only 30 or so that have even posted in the past month.
>
>What is going on with the rest of you? If you are trying to learn this
>stuff, start asking some questions so we can have some discussion on topics
>other than the esoteric. If you are a pro already please jump in and share
>your knowledge. Tell the group what you are building, what you want to
>build, what you have made that was a failure. Come on, there has to be more
>happening out in our collective workshops than BSing about digitizers most
>of us will never build and writing G-code parsers most of us will never
>write. Don't mean to disparage these topics, but they are not high on my
>list of exciting discussion topics. Let's hear about cutting some metal and
>making chips or sparks (didn't want to forget the EDM part of our name).
>
>Tim
>[Denver, CO]
>On the quest to broaden our discussions
>
>

I've been making jewellery for 25+ years and cnc machines seemed like a
good way to expand my repertoire of available tools and techniques. Gold
and silver machining is just too expensive but wax for investment casting
works fine. CNC offered the prospect of being able to do very detailed work
and good tools for handling scaling and repetion of design elements.
I started with a rough xy table using the motors and electronics from an
old DMP-40 plotter being run by a cad program. The next step was to convert
a Unimat SL to steppers and Dancad. I've learned a lot in the past couple
of years the hard way and found this list an invaluable resource, from the
first excitement over " it MOVES !!! " to actually being able to do
customers jobs better and faster than any other way I know.
Recent work has been making the progression from pocketing in layers to
full 3D modeling along with the addition of a 4th axis. And always the
planning for the next machine... bigger, faster and more accurate, but then
almost anything would be :-)

Jeff Demand
jdemand@...