On Dec 14, 2007, at 3:26 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > > Yeah I know, a micromill is a sows ear, but its what I could afford > at the > time. It doesn't much resemble the catalog picture now. :)
The mini mill and the micro mill are a lot of metal for the money. I have a friend who is about 3/4 of the way to CNCing his mini. If you can get the gibs to not bind and not have play then you are good to go. He has a lot more backlash too, but has rebuilt his leadscrews and nuts and got rid of most of it. I used TurboCNC for years with my Taig and steppers (stepper drivers of my own design). I started with TurboCNC 3.51 (?) and it would not look ahead, each and every move would start and stop. I transitioned to 4.01 and it was much better. It also included loops and variables. A friend bought me Mach3 for my birthday and I upgraded my CNC laptop to use it. After fiddling with it (and the nightmare that is it's GUI) I wasn't all that thrilled with it. I had messed with EMC years ago (it was running under redhat 7.2 if memory serves), and I wanted to see how well it worked now. So I've had experience with TurboCNC and backlash etc. Here's my observations: Turbo CNC 4 is way better than 3.5. Turbo CNC works great on a 133 MHz 486. Mach3's interface is a nightmare. Mach3 seems to work better than TurboCNC, the moves are smoother and the velocity is more consistent The Mach3 backplot isn't nearly as nice as EMC. It's also postage stamp sized on the default screen, and it's a nightmare to build a new screen for Mach3. EMS moves the smoothest of all three, the cuts are consistent and the code seems very robust. The backplot screen is great on Axis. The other screens are pretty good, but I'm loving the simplicity of axis. I have about a thou of backlash on all three axis, and the backlash compensation in EMC seems to work well. Actually Mach3 does a good job of it too. Sheldon ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
