Right now I have at most 5 inches of Z axis travel. This is sufficient for most parts, except when I have to use a short tool (little end mill) and a long tool (drill bits in chucks).
In this latter case, if I move the knee by hand, I lose the Z position and X and Y offsets. Secondly, it would be great to have the Z move by prescrivbed amount without having to crank that handle. My mill has pneumatic knee assist. I have a DC servo motor (really just a DC motor with a shaft sticking out in the back) with a 15:1 gear reduction. So, it will let me move the knee at a reasonable speed. I use Jon's PPMC and have enough encoder inputs and DA outputs. (two encoder cards and two I/O cards). I already have four axis working (X, Y, X and A -- rotary table). I also have an encoder on the spindle for rigid tapping, all working. This will be the final, 5th axis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
