Re: Galesburg CNC workshop - overall views

Well, it took me two days to recover from the drive home and the head
cold that took me by surprise the last couple of days, but it was
GREAT!

So many talented people and lots of real hardware to play with. I got
to meet many of the regulars on the list and many who are probably
lurkers. The environment was casual and friendly. There were over a
hundred people in attendance and they were all serious about CNC.

Galesburg is a small (35,000) town and the shop was several miles
outside of town, surrounded by corn fields! Accomodations, traffic,
and costs were all reasonable. The heat was a bummer and travel time
was a common issue. Then again, where could you have such a show and
be convienent for everyone?

The flea market was slow, but Roland tried to make up for it somewhat
by offering a lot of his surplus stuff for sale. He even had an
auction of seven Bridgeport CNC machines. These were iron only, but
were quite a bargain for those willing to deal with moving such a
thing.

There were constant seminar sessions. About half were prepared
presentations and the rest were anything goes question and answer
sessions. If you came with questions and did not get them answered,
it could only be because you didn't ask them. All the presenters and
vendors spent lots of time helping folks with learning CNC.

Extensive shop facilities were available for fabrication and many
people left with a widget they need to complete their conversion.

The EMC crew tackled a large vintage Mazak milling machine. This
beast originally had a Fanuc 6M controller, but had be modified with
a kludged up spindle drive and was in no condition for normal use as
the kludge did not allow the tool changer to function. They were able
to get most every thing wired up (over 30 outputs and 40 inputs) but
in the end the servo amps could not be run because no one realized
that they needed a tachometer input. This was not clear in the
available documentation and had been derived from the encoders by the
6M controller and fed back to the servos as an analog signal. This is
something none of us had seen before. The EMC software could command
the servo amps, but lacking the tachometer signal, control was not
possible. Planning for another session to complete the work is
already in process. This is a really dedicated group! As many as six
people at a time were working on this beast.

Friday evening there was a cookout and raffle. There were so many
prizes contributed by the vendors that almost half the tickets were
winners. Of course it was a little amusing to watch vendor A winning
a prize contributed by vendor B.

For those who could make it, this was a one of a kind experience.

Cheers,
Steve Stallings
www.PMDX.com






--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com, "John Stevenson" <john@s...>
wrote:

> Well this years workshop has finished and for the folk such as my

self who wasn't able to make the trip could we have some input over
what went off?