Jon, perfectly right. There are parts you can *only* make in a CNC lathe. In fact, a couple of yeas ago, I CNC-equipped my lathe only for the one purpose of turning large grinding discs, positive and negative curvature of exactly the same radius of, say, 4 or 6 meters, of 300 mm diam. cast iron slabs. How would you do that manually? Since then, I dismantled the steppers and all again though, because with most parts, I can make one piece faster than write a program for the CNC machine.
Peter Am 08.03.2013 18:57, schrieb Jon Elson: > It absolutely depends on the parts you make. If you make mostly > rectangular parts, a mill is an obvious choice. If you make free-form > carved parts, it is also quite good. But, if you largely make round > parts, perhaps for tube fittings, valves, sliding rods and pistons, > etc. then a lathe is WAY more efficient. I have not CNC'd my lathe, as > I rarely do production parts of that nature, But I can easily see > where a different mix of parts to be made would make a CNC lathe way > more useful. Also, there are things that are TRIVIAL on a CNC lathe > that are harder to do on a manual lathe. I am thinking of things with > tapers, or tapered threads. A couple lines of G-code vs. a couple > hours of exacting setup and calibration. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 positioned as A LEADER in The Forrester Wave(TM): Endpoint Security, Q1 2013 and "remains a good choice" in the endpoint security space. For insight on selecting the right partner to tackle endpoint security challenges, access the full report. http://p.sf.net/sfu/symantec-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
