On Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 2:28:45 AM UTC-8, robobass wrote:
Don't be so quick to discount knee mills with a sliding ram. They can be very versatile when you need to do large plates/parts.

I did have a Boss3 for many years. What I have now fits my needs for my current situation very well. Here in Germany, a big knee mill is much more expensive than in North America, new or used. Also, all big industrial machinery here runs on 380-400v only, and I have to make do with a single 3.8KW 220v circuit for the whole shop. Riggers charge more too. A knee mill just isn't in the cards for me.

Al's specialty is 3 axis surfacing toolpath. Many CADCAM systems use the ModuleWorks toolpath engine. Al knows the ModuleWorks toolpath engine very well as he's spent many years supporting it:

I just watched a few of his videos. Very helpful!


Glad to hear this!

It can takes a lot of effort to master surfacing toolpath because their parameters are often changed as developers improve them.

I create surfacing toolpath everyday and I still run into situations that I struggle with.