Hello cruel world

Hi everyone

I was a CNC virgin until last year when I was asked by my son to get his “new” CNC machine working for use in a production environment, just because I have an IT background.

My son purchased a secondhand EMACH (they went out of business 14 years ago, just after the previous owner purchased it and it sat around taking up space in his workshop before we purchased it), it is full sheet size machine and apart from little use it appears to be of good quality, nice and rigid, solid gantry, rack and pinion X and Y, leadscrew Z, and a 6 position auto tool changer.

The system ran on Windows XP and ran a very old version of the Eding control software. After the pains of updating the PC and Windows to the latest version and conecting it to the company network, updating the control firmware and software we started to run the machine for production, big mistake! Murphy’s Law, the machine did not cut square or very accurately. More learning and after a lot of sweat and tears I finally got it up and running to within 0.5mm, still not good but okay for small pieces. I have to add t hat Bert and his team where great in assisting me with a, for me, perplexing issue, we had to cut some cabinet doors with a morse code like detail of through holes 5mm x 5mm (dots) and 5mm x 10mm(dashes), well they were all over the place, with Bert’s team we norrowed it down and I found the X axis motor mount was loose and there was no backlash compensation set, can you tell how green I was?

Well we got those out of the way, eventually and the machine had already paid off half of it’s investment. Hopefully I can get it a little more user proof as I live in Bangkok and the machine is in the UK. I have set the machine up so I can login and check it from Thailand and do some stuff remotely.

So I have taught myself, not only how the CNC works but also Autocad (for designing parts) and Cut2D for the toolpaths and having spent hours on YouTube have lots of ideas for getting the machine more reliable and productive during my visit next month.

I like the idea of this forum and appologise in advance if I post what may seem dumb questions in the future.

Dicke

I had a limited amount of experience with an Emach and liked the Eding part a lot more than the Emach part.I do remember the difficulty of trying to deal with,or even get hold of,the boss at Emach and if I ever encounter him again I won't be doing business with him.You have been spared that frustration.It may even be that you have the very machine now since the last I heard was that it had been moved to an empty shed in Wroxham.