Originally Posted by
bobeson
Wow, this discussion sheds a lot of light on individual personalities here.
I am a Tormach PCNC1100 Series II owner, bought new right when the Series II was released, and have done a lot of work cutting mostly steel but also aluminum and wood. I have experienced quite a few significant problems that were clearly established to be caused by flaws in Mach. This is using a control computer bought from and configured by Tormach, and using their outstanding tech support to establish root-cause in several instances. By "significant problems" I mean things like the spindle plowing into the table unprogrammed, with no offset errors or other human-influenced issues, just "random" motion plunges, out of control. Ultimately, this was traced to a fault caused by interaction between Mach and the sound card driver for the machine, despite it working fine for years previously, and with no other software installed to blame. It just cropped up one day, and stuck around until I re-installed the OS, Mach, and disabled the sound system entirely (I had no speakers, so didn't need/use it anyhow). I got lucky to find a repeatable test case that let me easily reproduce the problem, and other people to not reproduce the problem, etc.
I have heard many, many other Tormach owners complaining of Mach bugs and problems caused by Mach in general. The bit-banged parallel port control system is just trouble waiting to happen, and it does, frequently. The fact that any particular indivuduals may not have experienced Mach bugs, or realized they have experienced them, does not take away from the basic truth that Mach3 bit-banging over a parallel port is just bad news, as experienced and testified to by many, many Tormach owners over the years. Just go back and re-read some relevant threads with an open mind if you doubt this. I know I've posted about problems multiple times.
I haven't been using my mill much this year, unfortunately, but hopefully that will be changing, thanks to new projects and with new enthusiasm from my recent acquisition of a Dynomotion KFlop/KAnalog combo that I plan to use to replace the existing machine control board. When I find some linear scales at a good price I'm also going to be installing them and closing the positioning loop with the steppers and KFlop. At some point I'm looking forward to ditching my spring-loaded power drawbar setup and switching to a gear-reduction approach with a threaded rigid drawbar, like Ray has taken with his designs. I may combine this with an oversized servo spindle and possibly some kind of automatic switching mechanism for high/low gear and spindle-lock/drawbar turn functions, but I haven't figured out those details enough yet.
In any case, there is no question that Mach has problems, and many Tormach owners have experienced these problems. I don't know why you want to continue denying this plain truth; it seems as though your brand loyalty compels it perhaps? But why? Tormach is doing just fine, and we are doing them a better service to speak the plain truth about their products than to talk nonsense like denying the existence of Mach problems on Tormach machines. That's just absurd.