This list is probably as good a place to carry forward a bit of thinking about open hardware and virtual CNC machine companies as any because this is THE place to find the control software for a wide range of these kinds of devices.
I'll snip both Kirk and Jorge quite a bit and I suggest you do the same if you reply to this. --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I am trying to see if through innovative sourcing and design the price > of VMC of HMC could be brought down. Way down. The current innovative sourcing, and increasingly the design, is called China, or the next poor country lucky enough to get a chance to gain what many take for granted. Trying to get people to do more work for less money has a long history. Um yes in a way but the low-cost labor advantage works best for mass produced products which CNC has never been. Consider even the largest room full of CNCs and it's a small handful compared to toasters or automobiles. And yes many Chinese machine tool companies, all of the ones I've visited, have engineering staffs that are hungry to design and develop these kinds of projects. They also have managers and bean counters that compel cost effective work and distribution agreements within the constraints of international trade. IMO the issue of low cost labor out there doesn't prevent the development of a low-cost CNC machine elsewhere -- ie this list. Certainly it will lower the bar that we have to slide under and in the long run our cost effective designs will become their next round of released products. > The over all objective is to try and create open source hardware > designs. I am not doing this on my own I am being sponsored by my > company MFG.com to try and get this off the ground. It is easy to imagine a place in an open machine project for a "broker" like MFG. But a business like that assumes a demand for a specific number of widgets on the customer side. Any open design is going to take a while to place the first few. I think this was one of the issues with Kirks first suggested project. It doesn't just happen out of a couple of posts. Several years ago, a fellow named Hassan designed and built a nice, low-cost benchtop mill as part of his graduate degree and brought it to NAMES and Fest (EMC-Monday). I believe that he is still receiving this list. That mill created a LOT of interest at the show and quite a few folk were ready to sign up to purchase a kit that included all of the aluminum and leadscrew parts. Just guessing but I'd say he could have sold 25 kits on the spot. The point is that it is possible to stir interest that would lead to a first round of ordering. But it does require a real prototype that does some real work. This list is not the place to stir up that interest. We tend to be much to independent but then that is a very different lecture that I refer to as Explorers vs Settlers. > I've never build a > CNC machine before, however I like the challenge of reducing the price > of proprietary hardware. I wonder if the advantage of an open or collaborative project is not in reducing cost of production, but the cost of distribution or similar costs by cutting out the "middle man" (and maybe the tax man). This has a history too. The cost of production might go up a bit over a Haas or similar machine because of quantity discounts and aftermarket sales and service. It's a bit like the cost of a PC being lower if it includes that other OS because of all the advertising and steering of next expenditure provided by that company's install. But you are right that there are savings to be had at nearly all levels. Put on top of that the customer supplying the assembly, tuning, and testing and we have some real advantage. Rayh ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
