"Gil HASH" wrote in message
...
Thanks all
With all posts my choice gets more and more difficult but it's very very
interesting ;-)
Here's something that hasn't been mentioned before .. or maybe I missed it.
For a newbie, I think that the learning progression is very important. I
learned to use a lathe before a mill, and I'm glad I did it in that order.
The lathe is a lot easier to learn than the mill. In lathe work, it is easy
to tell when the tool is dull and perhaps more important, easy to sharpen
yourself. You can't sharpen end mills yourself or even worse, horizontal
mill cutters .. unless you are very experienced and/or have some quite fancy
tool grinding equipment. The cost of learning, in broken and ruined
tooling is significant. Making mistakes with speed, feed, and tool geometry
on a single-point lathe tool is far more forgiving and far less expensive.
The issues of cutting speed, feed, and depth of cut for lathe work is very
intuitive. Usually, when in trouble (chatter, rough finish, etc.) backing
off (e.g, lighter cut) solves the problem. In milling, that may be the
worst thing to do. I've learned (the hard way) that these issues in milling
are often quite counter-intuitive. In lathe work, the direction of the
work is fixed... and you can feed toward the headstock (usual) or toward the
tailstock .. but it doesn't make a whole lot of difference which if you use
a live tailstock center. In milling, the direction of the feed relative to
the rotation is very important and can make a big difference in the result.
Then there are ll the issues of work holding, which are much more complex in
milling. All in all, I'd say that milling is at least five times trickier
than lathe work...and ten times more expensive in broken and ruined tools
during the learning phase.
Boris
-------------------------------------
Boris Beizer Ph.D. Seminars and Consulting
1232 Glenbrook Road on Software Testing and
Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006 Quality Assurance
TEL: 215-572-5580
FAX: 215-886-0144
Email bsquare "at" earthlink.net
------------------------------------------
|