Ah, but that's the great part about a CNC conversion! You can have most of the best of both worlds.
I generally like CNC jogging as a variable speed power feed. For manual operation, many people will add dual shaft stepper motors and put the handles on the back shafts of the motors. Turn off the power to the stepper motor drives and turn the handles for manual operation. For systems with encoders, you can still use LinuxCNC as a digital readout. I replaced the lathe cross slide with gang tooling for my low volume production needs and I can use LinuxCNC for the rare tapers and other cross slide purposes I might need (albeit not as easily as a cross slide for one-off jobs), but others may prefer to keep the cross slide for convenient manual use while still having CNC control when that's appropriate. I like the lathe tailstock for manual use, and I kept it. The gang tooling has three locator pins and can be quickly removed and the tailstock can be slid forward for manual use. I do agree that most purpose built CNC machines aren't good for manual use and there really are applications for both types of machines, but CNC conversions can offer a lot of the best of both worlds. Most home shops have neither the space nor the capital to invest in multiple versions of a machine. If I could only have one lathe or one milling machine, I'd want a CNC conversion that I could still use manually. On 06/13/2013 01:03 PM, andy pugh wrote: > I agree to an extent, but I think it depends on the class of work that > you are doing. > For unusual one-off setups I suspect that a conventional job-shop > lathe is probably a more useful layout than a dedicated CNC. > (As an example, many CNC lathes don't even have a tailstock). > I all too often "think in metal" and watch the part I need appear > progressively as I design it concurrently with making it. This is a > bit more of a challenge with a dedicated CNC with guards and > bar-feeders and the rest of the stuff. I don't think I have seen a > dedicated CNC with a fixed steady either (because if you need a fixed > steady and can afford a CNC lathe then you probably have a better > tool for the job. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
