well basically to give a little more background info, I have just completed a manual machine shop class at a county college and I wanted to get into CNC machining. Our family business is selling parts for packaging machinery and right now we sort of act like the middle man, such that I and my father go to companies and sell parts, I draw the parts up in Solidworks, we give the prints to our few different machine shops we use, they make the parts and we mark up their prices. Since I know how to measure and draw the parts, I am pretty computer savor (computer programmer by profession), I was also interested in learning how to actually machine some of these parts. I also have a younger brother who is about to finish highschool that wants to get involved in the family business. My dream is to one day open my own machine shop so that the work we sell to our customers we have full control over the pricing, delivery time frame, etc. if we have our own shop. So my brother would be very wise to learn machining and I also have an interest in learning some machining. I just need a CNC machine to make the parts we sell. Of course the more advanced parts we will always continue to have our main job shops make because they have the large high priced cnc equipment, but I would like to get a smaller cnc machine that can handle some of the parts we sell and at the same time learn how to operate a cnc machine, get my brother into it as well, and also learn the g-code, etc. I would assume the g-code used on these smaller Cnc lathes is the same g-code used on the larger industry grade lathes and mills right?
so as you can see I don't have a ton of money to make a large investment, I'm looking for a smaller cnc lathe that I can fit in my garage of my house and I really dont' want to get a phase 3 converter, so something that runs on 110 or 220 single phase would be very helpful. I would think that those plastic parts would be something that one of these small SYIL CNC C6 type cnc lathes could handle right? I just wonder how long it would take to cut one of these parts on a machine like that..  |