Well I'm new to just about everything about machining but I've always wanted a mill and lathe. Now with christmas here and a few fortunate events I have enough cash to get a taig cnc mill but first I feel like I need to ask some questions.
1. I've read extensively but never actually seen this mill and I think that I understand that any slop in the ways and backlash can be taken care of with the gib screws and adjusting the net to get reasonable accuracy at the expense of some more friction. Is this more or less the case.
2. I plan to use this for hobby use, not production. But I am a bit of a perfectionist so I do expect to be within something like .001 or so at most times. I plan to work with alot of aluminum, no real desire to work with anything like steel or SS 99% of the time. I would use the machine to do some pcb engraving atleast initially until I used it to build the parts for a dedicated engraver/router. My first two projects will be a giant cd changer (6x6 feet wallmount) and a router/engraver. Is this machine up to the task?
3. Coming from a point where I have nothing in the shop but a few drillbits what accessories should I look for right off the start. So far I think I'd want a standard drill chuck, a few good endmills and a fly cutter, any other suggestions. I guess I'd want to build/buy a rotary table at some point but the price on them seems a bit high from what I've seen, hopefully I could put something together myself.
4. From a control perspective, I'm comfortable in autocad, atleast in 2d, and a bit of 3d. I can get what I need done most of the time and I can muck about in other programs reasonably well (I'm a programmer by trade) and I'm thinking that maybe bobcad-cam is the way to go. Either that or just stick with something like autocad+mach2. I dont want to be stuck with designing absolutely everything so its important to me that I have a controller that lets me more or less manually run the mill from the keyboard. Being able to input jogging a set number of steps or whatever manually just because It seems to me that some simple operations aren't worth the time modelling when I can just do them right then and there in the raw as it were. Any recommendations on what will give me the best compromise for what I want?  |