On 2013-11-03, BottleBob wrote:
On Sunday, November 3, 2013 4:58:04 AM UTC-8, Lloyd E. Sponenburgh wrote:

[ ... ]

Advertising, cheap low-end stepper-driven machines from China, and ARM
processors have made the entire category of CNC more common and more
affordable.

Now... 'Home Shops' that have big CNC iron are fewer, to be sure! But
even that's becoming more common as conversions become simpler and less
expensive to do.

Hmmm, OK. I'll go with "A minority of 'Home Shops'..." in the future
if that's more accurate.

I hear RogerN talking about his CNC machine, along with his manual
machines, but I don't hear many others talking about their CNC
equipment, so I figured that Roger was an anomaly.

I have (and use) a small CNC lathe (The Emco-Maier
Compact-5/CNC). I also have a Bridgeport which started live as a
stepper-based CNC, which I was converting to servo motors, before a fire
set me back a ways. I'll get back to that as time goes on.

Just a bit of personal info, I have a CNC Sherline I bought some 10
odd years ago, about 5 years before I retired. It's still in the boxes
it came in. Not sure that toy even qualifies as a real CNC machine.

Well ... I've gotten a lot of use out of the little
Compact-5/CNC, even though it is rather slow. Among other things, it is
the easiest way *I* have to cut metric threads at present. The 12x24"
Clausing manual machine has a set of transposition gears, but is a real
pain, because the half-nuts need to be kept closed from the start of the
thread until it is complete.

But some other things which I started doing on the little CNC
lathe turned out to be a lot quicker on the Clausing, using a bed
turret, and Geometric die head among other things.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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