Pockets in Al plate update

I have run into this while looking for a mill, I found one that has a tracer attachment to it, but the hydraulic controllers replaced the handles and could never find any information if I could get handles to work with it as well.

I did see one cinci knee mill that had computer controller powerfeed 3 axis, with dro's that still had the handles on all the axis, that was when I first started looking and I did not ask questions as it was out of my price range at

I wish I had dug into it now that I have a CNC router/plasma table, it is awesome, heck I used it just to cut rectangle backing plates that were 10-16 *

If I had the money, I would have a cnc mill or some sort! the hardest part would be learning to use the software to do 3d work.

I am about to setup to use this table to cut pockets myself for foam and will also setup to tray some aluminum and see how that works out, I'm putting a 3 hp router on it to start, I looked into single motors but to learn they are far out of price range for now

Not necessarily. I set my CNC up with handwheels. you can just turn the servo off and turning by hand, the servo encoder still works so you have a DRO.

I must say for several years i haven't used this feature. I have a great manual mill that uses the same tooling. Its even more rigid than my CNC with power feed on all axis. There are a lot of jobs that are easier on a manual mill.

Karl

It depends. The first CNC mill which I encountered -- a Taiwanese clone of a Bridgeport retrofitted by Anilim to CNC had Dished handwheels with spring-loaded folding crank handles whose balance was such that the handle would stay folded in at high speeds. (This was a servo conversion, not a stepper one, FWIW, and the rapid motion was scary. :-) Anyway -- stop the CNC control, and you have just enough current through the servos to avoid self-feeding of the ball screws, and you can easily use the handwheels to feed it -- with proper dials still present.

However, my Bridgeport BOSS-3 (being converted to servos) is quite different.

The X-axis ball leadscrew is rigidly mounted to the right end of the table, and the ball nut is mounted between a pair of opposed tapered bearings with the proper preload to minimize backlash). That ball nut is rotated via a stepper (or servo) mounted well below the table on the right side of the knee. No access by hand to the timing belts used to connect them.

The Y-axis ball leadscrew is rotated, but by a timing belt from a stepper below it which is recessed into the knee, and it is all covered. (There is a Veeder-Root counter to display the X and Y axis positions.) But there is no access for a handwheel.

The Z-axis is actually a hollow ball screw which surrounds the quill, so the feed is truly on axis (the Anilam conversion above used a ball screw in place of the feed stop screw, so it is pressing off center and would hasten wear of the quill in the headstock.) However, again the ball nut is mounted in bearings and turned via a timing belt and a motor off to the left of the headstock. The original stop screw is used to actuate the feed limit switches instead, and can't be used to read the position. There is a dial on the bottom of the pulley so you can tell where in a rotation the motor (and ball screw) are, but not which rotation.

The control, when the CNC is stopped, has jog modes which allow motion of 0.001", 0.010" 0.100" and 1.000" -- rotate a switch to point to the desired size of the jog, and then push in the switch (which is also a pushbutton) to cause the motion. I've actually done a little machining with this, but it was a serious pain. :-)

So -- all in all, I would have to say that this one was not suited for manual machining, and that the Anilam conversion (or some other custom conversion of a manual mill) would be the better choice, with the folding handle handwheels, so you don't get whacked by the handle when you stand too close just when it is going into a rapid motion. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Most any CNC mill can be used manually if it has an MPG. Just select the axis and a suitable step rate and crank away. I can't really see why you would want to though when you can just "manually" machine one line of G code at a time in MDI mode.

By MPG I presume you mean Manual Pulse Generator. The Bridgeport did not have that, and while there were complete schematics, the CPU was a DEC LSI-11, and there was no source code for it to allow adding such things to it. (Not to mention that it was limited to 64K bytes (32K words) of memory -- both the G-code program memory, and the machine language code (in ROMs) which translated the G-codes into actual motion. This was in the early days of CNC. Bridgeport's BOSS-3 was the first model to escape form the factory (nobody seems to know what happened to the BOSS-1 and BOSS-2 -- presumably died of too many bugs to be released. :-) They stayed with the stepper motors up through the BOSS-6, and I'm pretty sure that the BOSS-8 was servos, but I don't know whether the BOSS-7 was similarly invisible or not. :-)

Nobody ever released a version of EMC/LinuxCNC for the LSI-11, and I doubt that anyone would bother with the limitations of memory. (Back then, they even measured the memory in "feet" (feet of punched paper tape, at 10 bytes per inch. That whole address space would only hold 546.1333 feet of tape -- even if no space were being used for the code in ROM. :-) This is one reason why they came fitted with a punched tape reader. If you set your program up right, you could load almost as much as memory was available for, then run that part, and when it was done, it would automatically read the next chunk of tape to proceed with the program. Then, you were only limited by how much tape you could get on a reel. (Or maybe even more, if you could swap tapes while it was running the last chuck which would fit on one tape -- but that required being a bit more alert than CNC made common.

Why not three MPGs -- one per axis, so you could crank two axes at once -- or even three if you put one in reach of your knee. :-)

Obviously, as I convert it to servos, a MPG is a nice feature to add for positioning and for testing layouts with the system serving as a DRO.

Enjoy, DoN.

It's kinda fun sitting on the table of a large gantry machining center, MPG pod in hand, dialing around the table you're sitting on (X) as well as the gantry (Y) and head (Z) as you reinstall the spindle cartridge after rebuilding it.

FWIW, even the latest Fanuc CNCs drip-feed large programs to the control's memory from a remote DNC computer. It only has 8 Mb, I think, and it's all a special flash memory that's designed to last for

Fanuc is obsessive about reliability and will not put a hard drive in their controls -- they say hard drives have no place on a factory floor.

I've used a Bridgeport ProtoTRAK mostly in manual mode with the jog dial. It's a little less convenient in some ways than turning the handwheels, but I didn't have to reach as far. It was good enough for one-off prototype jobs that often included milling a casting to a scribed line or drilling at transfer punch marks.

jsw