[drumsticksplint]

Hi all,

I've been looking at changing my manual mill for a Bridgeport Interact. They come up for sale quite often in the UK and are quite cheap to buy. I'm just trying to find out a bit more about them before I sell my old mill and find I've made a mistake. I want the Interact for machining aluminium plate and drilling / tapping holes from steel I'll cut on my cnc plasma. I'm just wondering if I'll still be able to do all the things I do on my manual mill, because most of it tends to be touchy feely engineering. Is there any manual override as such for on the fly cutting? I'm hoping that if I find the right machine I'll convert it to mach3 eventually. Also, I should add that I've never used a cnc milling machine before, so be gentle

Any advice would be helpfull.

Adam.

[Shanghyd]

My series 2 interact 2 has a handwheel and I've used that to manually mill some things. I don't think you will get the same feedback on the handwheel as you would with the manual hand crank but its a trade off I guess.
Then you have the MDI capabilities. Tell the table to move to a destination at a feedrate and off it goes. Quick movements without writing a CNC program. I don't have a manual mill just the CNC mill.

[drumsticksplint]

Hi Shanghyd,

Thanks for your helpful reply. I'm becoming more and more fond of this idea, so looks like my manual mill might be up for sale shame cause I love that damn thing, but don't have the spare cash to have both.

How easy would it be for someone like myself who has no gcode programming knowledge to get an interact to do something like a square bolt hole pattern? Is it something I could learn as I go along, or will I be stuck with a machine I can't get to move without knowing it inside out?

[gus]

An interact can use g code, but need not. Conversational is the way to go

The DC spindle versions seem to have some problems, but the vari speed style are pretty robust

[Shanghyd]

My interact has a TNC151 controller. It has both conversational programming and g code. Neither are hard to learn. The Interact also has cannned cycles for drilling, circle milling, slotting, bolt circles and some other operations.
None of it is hard, so I wouldn't worrry about having a large paperweight.

[drumsticksplint]

Thanks for your replies. Seems like It would be very useful for me to have in my shop because its takes me forever to do any machining on my manual mill which has no dro. Something I've never played with is machine tapping. Its something that I require more and more but haven't ever done it on a milling machine. Would I have to use a compression tapping head with the interact? Also, do they have quick change tooling on all the interacts? As this would be an absolute godsend, takes me all my time changing collects!!!

Thanks,

Adam.