What a machine!!!

Even the battery electric drill was developed for the US Moon landings, mainly as a tool for drilling for samples of lunar soil, now most households have one for better or worse. Ian S C

If you go to their website you can spend an hour or six watching lots of fascinating machining.

Roy.

No offence taken, just a fact of industry!

Bri

I can't begin to fathom how the designers (of the machine) wrote the control software for it. An ordinary 3 axis mill yes but that thing. It gives me a headache just thinking about it

David

Hi guys, did quite a bit of that on a twin headstock Mazak Fusion a few years ago & I was already past official retirement age then, so I can tell you that you cant prove out jobs like that by pushing the green button & sticking your fingers in your ears ! Certainly keeps you on your toes, machine cost £150,000 in 2008. However even relatively simple components have their times slashed beyond all recognition when they come off the machine finished, try manually loading 4000 items for a 2nd operation with a cycle time of 9 seconds if you want to lose the will to live! The holy grail of CNC machining since the 1970s, one hit machining, I used to do it on a pair of ancient Herbert Batchmatic bar machines back then, 2 turrets cutting simultaneously & the only deburring removing the sharp edge on the part off side if the hole went right through with an electric screwdriver with a countersink in it. Even now in my own workshop I often try to machine a lot of items where concentricity is an issue complete at one setting.

That lump of steel has a broken off piece of a tap in it. Around the 3.20 minute mark, the tap breaks...

Just joking...

> But the curved slot is 0.75mm wide and the hole towards the outer of the central spar is 0.5mm.

Bloomin' 'eck, I thought it looked thick for a gasket...

Neil

I came across some one some time ago that had an auto shop, mixed including stuff for 2nd opps. He made a good easy living. Came to the conclusion that he had to go cnc and then spent all of his time including a lot when he would rather have been doing something else chasing work for it to pay for it.

Going even further back when cnc was coming out of the research stage a bloke at Lucas set out to revolutionise making car brake cylinders - drum brakes mainly. He did it and then found he just couldn't match the prices of a sweat shop in France. Total costs were way too high.

I buy some camera gear. Mainly mirrorless, dslr's are too cumbersome. Looks to me that of late the outer parts of the dearer lenses are made from bar or tube stock on a machining centre - just pass the costs onto the customer. This idea seems to be spreading, saves making precision casting tools and also on quality control costs. At odds with the last revolution - in an ideal world no machining is done what so ever.

I must admit some machining centres are amazing. Load the bits onto pallets and they will look after themselves. A mix of milling turning drilling and what ever. A few machines costing around million quid some years ago. Pretty sure it was more like 2 actually. One thing that I found interesting was the time taken to get speeds, feeds and tooling correct for the finish that was required on the variety of parts they were making. ABS valves for air braked HGV's in this case from castings but one branch was working from bar stock on some valves.

John

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There's an article on a cnc workshop planned for MEW 232 that will be interesting for some.

Neil

As part of my working life as a service engineer I spent several years installing and servicing Swedish CNC Machining centres with pallet loaders, one company which made road hammers in Hemel Hempstead and G E in Rugby making steam turbine parts, watching these machines fascinated me for hours.