[TXFred]

Hello all. It's been a long time since I've posted here.

I'm planning on selling my 1100. Life has moved on and I haven't given it much use lately. I think I'd be better off with a manual mill for the work I've been doing. It's time to find it a new home. But I have no idea what a reasonable asking price is.

1100 Series 2 with stand.
ATC and power drawbar
Monitor/keyboard arm
Manual oiler
Tormach PC running Mach
Second E-stop added to the front of the stand.
Coolant upgrade with washdown hose.
8" 4th axis
Tapping head
I plan to keep all of my other tooling.

The mill's always been stored in a climate controlled space. Everything works perfectly.

What do you all think I should ask?

[Portlyinohio]

Personally as someone who started with manual machines I'd think long and hard about getting rid of it unless you need the money.

You can jog the thing around and use it exactly like a manual mill without all the hassle of having to crank handles .
unless you need bigger table and longer travels there's no advantage to be found .
Then think about the hassle of moving machines , and how much a good solid mill will cost to buy along with move .

If you keep it you'll still have the cnc for the complicated stuff .

And again speaking for myself ... except for ocasionaly using it for a drill press my manual mill sits there taking up space .

I have no experience with mach .. but with path pilot I can program simple squares, circles , bolt patterns , pockets and such things and do the actual work way way way faster then I can with ole handle cranky .
Even stupid simple things like squaring up stock is faster on the cnc then ole cranky handle .

Not to mention how much longer tooling life has been on the cnc versus manual

[TXFred]

They're valid points. But the problem is that to use the Tormach manually, I have to keyboard jog it or spend time with Mach wizards. And while I've programmed for CNC in the past, I'm out of touch with the current software. And when I start designing something, I want to just make it, not spend time at the computer modeling and programming it. That's an artifact of my ADD.

The Tormach was great when I was running a small business and making my own product. But for the kind of one-off spur of the moment things I do these days, a manual mill is superior.

But if your manual mill is not being used, I might want to but if off of you.

[srtstan]

I have a Bridgeport, with Newall OP700 DRO, rotary table and single phase input to 3-phase output VFD, I would be willing to work out some sort of trade.

[TXFred]

I have a Bridgeport, with Newall OP700 DRO, rotary table and single phase input to 3-phase output VFD, I would be willing to work out some sort of trade.

That's a very interesting idea. Where are you located? I'm in Round Rock, TX.

I can't PM you, your account is set to not allow private messages. But I think that if you PM me, it'll allow me to reply.

[Steve Seebold]

My Series II 1100 is not going up for sale till I absolutely have no further use for it. I’ve had it since July 2011 and it still runs perfectly, and I’m still running the Mach III operating system.

I’ve stuck with Mach III because it functions exactly like a Fanuc 6 or a Haas control both of which I am well acquainted with.

I thought about switching to the Path Pilot OS, but I’ve read about too many things it won’t do. I have developed a procedure for tapping holes and I’ve tapped thousands of holes from 2-56 up to 1/4-20 and I haven’t broken a tap yet. Most of the parts I make require an 8-32 thread for which I use a form tap. No chips to deal with.

[Bob La Londe]

They're valid points. But the problem is that to use the Tormach manually, I have to keyboard jog it or spend time with Mach wizards. And while I've programmed for CNC in the past, I'm out of touch with the current software. And when I start designing something, I want to just make it, not spend time at the computer modeling and programming it. That's an artifact of my ADD.

The Tormach was great when I was running a small business and making my own product. But for the kind of one-off spur of the moment things I do these days, a manual mill is superior.

But if your manual mill is not being used, I might want to but if off of you.

I use all of my CNC mills in "manual mode" fairy often. I do have pendants on them, but I don't do it that way. I just enter a line of code in the code entry field. It works in Mach 3 and in PathPilot. Its like a magic power feed that stops after it reaches its destination. I've been using my clapped out KMB1 conversion like that lately for squaring up blanks to length and surfacing work pieces. On a long slow cut I can enter the line of code, and then go attend to another machine. Its neither conversational nor programming. Its as close to manual as you can get without turning a handle and still retains some benefits of CNC.

That being said I am debating adding a decent manual knee mill to my shop. It would not replace anything. Just be an addition. To often all the CNCs have been busy and I needed to do something quick and dirty that wouldn't be easy on the baby mill drill.

[Bob La Londe]

My Series II 1100 is not going up for sale till I absolutely have no further use for it. I’ve had it since July 2011 and it still runs perfectly, and I’m still running the Mach III operating system.

I’ve stuck with Mach III because it functions exactly like a Fanuc 6 or a Haas control both of which I am well acquainted with.

I thought about switching to the Path Pilot OS, but I’ve read about too many things it won’t do. I have developed a procedure for tapping holes and I’ve tapped thousands of holes from 2-56 up to 1/4-20 and I haven’t broken a tap yet. Most of the parts I make require an 8-32 thread for which I use a form tap. No chips to deal with.

TC Tapping works fine on PathPilot. I run 10-32, 1/4-20, and 5/16-18 all the time. Thread milling works fine too.

Since I do manual coding and setup custom codes in CAM from time to time. I'm curious what does Mach 3 do that is lacking in PathPilot.

FYI: I use a modified Mach3 post processor for PathPilot. I added stuff to the tool change and program end sections to make things easier. I have not run across any issues. Also I am pretty sure EMC2 (the grand daddy of PathPilot) was a Mach3 spinoff back in the dark ages of hobby CNC.

[PCW_MESA]

TC Tapping works fine on PathPilot. I run 10-32, 1/4-20, and 5/16-18 all the time. Thread milling works fine too.

Since I do manual coding and setup custom codes in CAM from time to time. I'm curious what does Mach 3 do that is lacking in PathPilot.

FYI: I use a modified Mach3 post processor for PathPilot. I added stuff to the tool change and program end sections to make things easier. I have not run across any issues. Also I am pretty sure EMC2 (the grand daddy of PathPilot) was a Mach3 spinoff back in the dark ages of hobby CNC.

LinuxCNC and EMC were derived from public domain CNC software from NIST:

https://www.nist.gov/publications/en...-machine-tools

Not from Mach

[Bob La Londe]

I just received PM from somebody claiming I had it backwards. That Mach was the spinoff or splinter, but that they both definitely had some common roots. However that doesn't answer the question of what works in Mach and doesn't work in PP. Or vice versa. So far my personally modified Mach post has generated perfectly valid code for PP that works consistently every time.

[popspipes]

My Series II 1100 is not going up for sale till I absolutely have no further use for it. I’ve had it since July 2011 and it still runs perfectly, and I’m still running the Mach III operating system.

I’ve stuck with Mach III because it functions exactly like a Fanuc 6 or a Haas control both of which I am well acquainted with.

I thought about switching to the Path Pilot OS, but I’ve read about too many things it won’t do. I have developed a procedure for tapping holes and I’ve tapped thousands of holes from 2-56 up to 1/4-20 and I haven’t broken a tap yet. Most of the parts I make require an 8-32 thread for which I use a form tap. No chips to deal with.

Pathpilot does everything I used to do in Mach 3 except one main thing, PP does not get a mind of its own and cut parts in the wrong places at times!!

[Bob La Londe]

Pathpilot does everything I used to do in Mach 3 except one main thing, PP does not get a mind of its own and cut parts in the wrong places at times!!

I have traced most of Mach problems to just not having enough computing power. Yes, that is (sort of) a program failing. There are three machines in the machine room of my shop running Mach programs upto well over a million lines of code and they work just fine. I am running dual core 64bit processors with 16GB of memory. I still get some flakey stuff on The KMB1 with really large programs, but its running on an older 32 bit machine running under XP Pro 32.

I did note one thing when I was setting up tool changes. G53 performs slightly differently in Mach and PP. I think it was a fiddley thing related to what other commands and parameters it would accept at the same time on the command line in regards to feed rate. I got them both working fine with their respective post processors for quick tool changes and I forgot about it.

[cyclestart]

LinuxCNC and EMC were derived from public domain CNC software from NIST:

https://www.nist.gov/publications/en...-machine-tools

Not from Mach

I read somewhere Mach(whatever number) had the same origins as emc. I don't know if that's true but the (old) emc documentation and the early Mach docs have whole sections that are near identical. If nothing else they share large parts of a user manual.
More on topic no one has offered a ball park on this machine's value. If a fair trade can be arranged it's win-win.

[cyclestart]

I've always associated emc to be synonymous with the project now known as linuxcnc. According to Wikipedia the name emc existed from NIST days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...d_personal_CNC
I ran a machine with emc back in 2002 but had no part in the install and doubt I could have managed that install. The first time seeing a Mach user manual was deja vu

[shred]

"LinuxCNC" was "EMC" (supposedly they had to rename after objections from the company named EMC). It is very different internally than Mach.

Release notes, v 2.5.0. April 2012:
...
Rebranding: rename EMC to LinuxCNC"
...

G-code is G-code, more or less, so that part can pretty much copy the manual pages.

[cyclestart]

Derivations of the original EMC software have also led to several proprietary low cost PC based programs notably TurboCNC, and Mach3,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...d_personal_CNC
but that's Wikipedia so who knows how accurate. The quote suggests at least some ancestry (code) is shared beyond manuals. But yes, they evolved into very different things.

[ger21]

I have traced most of Mach problems to just not having enough computing power.

I run Mach3 on a 1Ghz Pentium III with I think 1Ghz of RAM, and it works fine. Mach3 was written to run on Windows 2000, It doesn't need a lot of power.

EMC was always open source, and I believe that when Art wrote Mach3, he based it on some of the original EMC code, so he didn't have to re-invent the wheel.

[BIRDTOOL]

I bought a series 2 5-6 years ago for 5500. Non Atc/pdb. Came w/ a bunch of holders,vise,stand. I'd say you'd be in the 8-9k but if u start higher u can always go down.

[Bob La Londe]

I run Mach3 on a 1Ghz Pentium III with I think 1Ghz of RAM, and it works fine. Mach3 was written to run on Windows 2000, It doesn't need a lot of power.

EMC was always open source, and I believe that when Art wrote Mach3, he based it on some of the original EMC code, so he didn't have to re-invent the wheel.

And yet... on multiple machines running large code files computing power AND memory have made the difference between a turd and a runner.

I too ran some programs just fine on lesser machines and in fact mentioned it in my selectively quoted post. I am sure the programs you run are just fine, but the fact is computing power and memory DO MAKE A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE. Sometimes between garbage and greatness. Universally better computers have resulted in better running machines for me. Not just on one (1) single machine either. Computing power is not the be all and end all of problem solving, You still have to set up your machine properly.

[ger21]

Mach3 can run very differently on different computers with the same or similar specs. Probably has more to do with the chipset and graphics than anything else.