international cooperation

Hi,

Thanks to Mariss, Jon, others, who gave valuable insight on the
stepper problem. It had been highly educational.

Hungry to learn somemore. Here are snatches of a conversation between
a machinning illiterate (M.I.) who happened to pick up some CNC
skills from CCED, with a skilled machinist (S.M.) hailing from India
who says he has done a bit of CNC.

Trying to marry their respective skill to get a PC based CNC'ed
Sherline lathe to make some small path while simultaneously trying to
learn each other's version of the Queen's English plus trying to cope
with conversion from metric to inch (inch because M.I set all his
controller software to Imperial to be in steps with all the American
experts here who refused to cooperate with the rest of the world and
switch to metric)

chuck raw part
___
\_______
| |
| |C
|_______|
___/


M.I.: "I need to fix the program. Where do you want me to set the
program zero?"

S.M. and M.I. cooperatively jogged the tool to somewhere near C, and
set x and z to zero. From hazy memory, S.M. then measured the OD of
the raw part and calculated OD/2

S.M.: "Move z to O.D./2."

M.I. using M.D.I G01 z(OD/2) F3 moved to the periphery of the raw part

M.I.: "Now what do you want me to do?"

S.M. quickly sketch a diagram of the required part something like
below

___
\___
| |___
| ___|
|___|
___/

M.I.: "You have to tell me how to move"

S.M.: "See the diagram"

M.I.: "You have to tell me how to move the tool to cut the part" etc.
etc.

Conclusion: nothing done (yet)

I think what S.M. expected was for one to just draw the part and
expect the machine to do the rest while M.I. want to use MDI to move
the tools to cut the part.

For those who are familiar with both machinning, PC based
and "professional" CNC lathe and can understand a bit of what both
S.M. and M.I. was trying to do, I hope you can provide some insight
as to what S.M. and M.I. need to do to be able to cooperate more
productively (hopefully not something like "buy Dolphin which can do
CAM for lathe work")

Thanks in advance

M.I.