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I have a couple of parts in mind right now, and I believe both could be made with a rotary table on a mill or a lathe using indexing. I don't think I'd want to spend all day cutting gears on a lathe...

Thanks for the info Matt. I've been using dies and taps for threading things and that works well for me for small quantities of parts.

Getting a rotary table for the lathe is something I had...

I have a Taig mill that I use for some things. I would like a way to create cylindrical parts.

I am trying to figure if a manual lathe or CNC rotary table would be a better fit. The lathe would...

I don't really like Mach 3. The gcode interpreter is to slow, there is a 250ms - 500ms pause before it executes a subroutine.

I don't want to take a step backward and install XP. I am not going...

I have a Dell SX280 (P4 3GHZ, 1GB RAM) which I am currently running Win 7, Mach 3, and a SmoothStepper board hooked up to a Gecko G540.

I recently switched to this dedicated PC due to stability...

Here is a good video that explains a couple different techniques.

Crash Course in Milling: Chapter 5 - Work Locating, by Glacern Machine Tools - YouTube

DTI? What is that? The edge finder I have is the standard, non-digital type that has a spring loaded mechanism that will "snap" when the probe reaches the edge.

Looks like this:
...

I watched the Tormach video already, but probably didn't calculate the offsets correctly. Is it good practice to find center off the front and side of the vise like I've been doing?

I'll try it...

I have the program set up to cut where I want. I have set 0,0 to be the lower left hand corner of the work.

How can I zero out the machine so 0,0 is at the lower left hand corner of the...

There are two main options Mach3 for Windows and EMC2 for Linux. A lot of folks on here use Mach3 and there is a free demo available. Emc2 is open source.

Bump.

:cool:

Anyone have any ideas?

I've seen some other guys looking for this too, but never any follow up as to if they'd found the correct one.

Here is what I know about it:

Rexon RJ3 16H
5/8" Chuck
5/16" Pilot Hole

I...

All I gotta do now is learn VHDL or Verilog :)

Really a lot cleaner UI than some of the screensets I've seen. The major problem I see with the way Mach3 does things is the guts of the screen are bitmaps. The text is part of the bitmap, so not...

My question is why not?

I've done some work professionally developing front ends for Fanuc and Seimens controls, and it was pretty fun work. I had the opportunity to really re-think the UI and...

Great idea, should give me a better understanding on that. There is also EMC2 as well.

So what does Mach actually transmit to the drive then? It's it gcode or some modified, compiled thing?

If you define the same global in your part, and change the one in your assembly does it change the value in your part to be the same as the other one?

How does a program like Mach3 work then? Mach3 can talk to a number of different drives, and you just provide it an XML configuration file about your drive and that tells it how to talk to the...

I am interested in writing my own CNC control program. How does the computer actually transmit the gcode? I assume one line of gcode is transmitted at a time and there must be some kind of response...

Andy, is the global variable inside a sub assembly or is it in the top level assembly?

I don't know the answer to your question but maybe you need to "define" the global in each assembly in which...

not a bad idea. Has anyone benchmarked tools from different manufacturers?

What about the materials or the manufacture of the cheaper endmills makes them less good? I know nothing about this stuff, and everything looks similar "on paper" so I really have no way of knowing...

I have a Taig mill on the way. I am wondering what your experiences have been with the less expensive endmill sets like:

Amazon.com: End Mill Set, 20 pieces 2 & 4 Flute: Home Improvement

and
...

Thanks m_c, it looks ilke Soigeneris has a quality product. Nice that it's got the USB control board integrated too.

Anyone have experience with these SmoothStepper boards?

Gentlemen,

I just ordered a Taig mill and now I need the drive and steppers. My vendor recommended the G540 and from my research, this seems like the way to go.

Are there any vendors out...

Thanks guys, I got in touch with Nick Carter and he was better able to help me understand what I needed.

Hey guys, I am looking to select a vendor for a Taig mill as this seems to be the best option. Problem is that the Vendors' websites are poorly designed and the information is hard to find! Not...

Thanks this pretty much answers my question.