True indeed, Randy. Unfortunately, my particular PC doesn't possess the BIOS settings needed to let it work that way. It pretty much only wants the power button on the front to turn it on [insert wife joke here]. I soon grew weary of crawling under the drip pan just to tap the button. As long as you have all of the sleepy things in Winders turned off (screen saver, disks, etc.), Mach 3 seems to work just fine.
As it is, I remoted the power button, two power LEDs (I have no idea what the amber one means except that maybe always off is good), and the hard drive activity LED. I kind of like to see the drive one flash when I plug in a thumb drive or start a Mach "Wizard" (in quotes because I'm underwhelmed by most of them; only a few of them are great).
As a result of all of this fiddling, I don't turn off the red power switch any more. I simply block the Z-axis up, let the PC power itself off, and press the e-stop on the mill. During thunderstorms I unplug both cords.
Regards,
- Just Gary
P.S. (Waaay off topic) Your avatar kills me, Randy. Every time I see a post from you I laugh at the picture. I'm sure you have your own story, but it sure strikes a chord with me. I've used cave-man tactics for machining all of my life, and getting the Tormach was a huge paradigm shift.
I'm embarrassed to say, but my "other" mill is a 1958 Shop Smith model ER (no such thing as a Mark V back then) with a chinese cross-slide vise clamped to the table. I was working on making a cross-slide vise for my 6" Craftsman (Atlas) lathe when I decided to buy the Tormach. The only good part of using the Shop Smith was that it is horizontal or vertical. Gravity can be your friend sometimes, and horizontal milling doesn't suffer the chip pilup the way that vertical does. It's happy as a table saw again, I'm sure.
Oh, for the good old days when feed was "crank" or "don't crank" and speed was "on" or "off." Funny, I have broken as much tooling in a month as I did over several years doing it the hard way. Of course, I've probably removed 10 times the metal in this month as I did the whole rest of my life.  |