Newby question on Manual & CNC

[loesch]

Have done woodworking for a bit and since moving into gunsmithing for an upcoming retirement hobby, have decided to get a vertical mill. I really like the new Super X3, AND, the CNC bug has hit. My problem is that I really don't want to loose the manual capability to do some simple gunsmithing like cutting a dovetail for the rear sight. My guess is many have both a manual and a CNC but I can't afford the cost nor the space. The Syil conversion seems to do away with the hand wheels. Does anyone now of a good CNC conversion that mantains the wheels or will I have to go it alone. I would think that you could have the motor and wheels at opposite ends, but I'm new at this and really don't know if that's possible.

[2muchstuff]

The motors just need to have a shaft coming out of both ends. One end will connect to your screw and the other gets a handwheel on it. You may have to piece together the controller and motors from different vendors to get what you want. If you want to use the mill manually just turn off the power to the drives and use it manually.

[CrazyRonny]

Or you can use the jog function to move the axis as you will do manually, instead of turning manually the handwheel, you just have to push the keyboard key for the axis you want to move and it will go in the direction you want at a preselect constant feed. And you can use the positionning system as a DRO. I think it's more precise like that, it just need some practice and you will completly forget the handweel.

CrazyRonny

[phil burman]

You don't need handwheels on a cnc mill in order to use it efficiently manually. In any case if you put ballscrews on your CNC mill (which you should) then the pitch will almost certainly be different so the original dials will be no good. Ball screws are not self holding, so machining manually with them can get exciting, and positioning is much easier with a keyboard and the jog function in any case. Also if you use the keyboard or a pendant then you have a DRO on each axis, you wont have this with the handwheels running manually. So what's left for the handwheels to do, nothing. Handwheels can also be dangerous if not implimented properly. It all makings handwheels about as useful as tits on a bull. The only plus for handwheels is in your head.

Forget about handwheels.

Regards
Phil

Have done woodworking for a bit and since moving into gunsmithing for an upcoming retirement hobby, have decided to get a vertical mill. I really like the new Super X3, AND, the CNC bug has hit. My problem is that I really don't want to loose the manual capability to do some simple gunsmithing like cutting a dovetail for the rear sight. My guess is many have both a manual and a CNC but I can't afford the cost nor the space. The Syil conversion seems to do away with the hand wheels. Does anyone now of a good CNC conversion that mantains the wheels or will I have to go it alone. I would think that you could have the motor and wheels at opposite ends, but I'm new at this and really don't know if that's possible.

[JRouche]

With a manual pulse generator (MPG) dial you will really enjoy manual machining with a CNC mill JRouche

[mdreitzusa]

you could use a digital rotary control like this for manual control.
http://www.electronics123.com/s.nl/i...=8&category=36
with a little adapting it could be used with any step/dir controller.

[wizard]

I realize that almost everybody here is on the side of just doing the "manual" work with the aid of the CNC control. That is very doable and I would highly reccomend it. But...... you do need or would benefit from handles on each axis. Not to machine with as ballscrews make that difficult but to operate the machine when using the controls isn't a good idea.

When is using the controls a bad idea. Well #1 would be recovering from a crash. In my mind you should do nothing with a mill, via the CNC controls, after a crash. You need to determine what happened. Sometimes with delicate tooling you can benefit from manual positioning before runing a routine. In almost all cases though it is smarter to move things with the CNC operator panel. The third possible reason would be the use of the machine as drill press. Of course using a real drill press is always smarter but if you are really limited on space this is a consideration. Do realize though that this usage requires a counter balanced head stock.

AS to the hand wheels DONOT use the hand wheels supplied with the mill. You DONOT want handles on the hand wheels that can catch you while the axis is in motion. The best approach would be smooth disks. This is a huge safety issue, the steppers or servos driving the machine produce a lot of torque. I'm not even a fan of the clutch type hand wheels.

Note to that there are a number of ways to use the CNC manually. You could simply use the feed rate moves on a specfic axis. You could also use the machines jog function if it has one and the jog velocity is controllable. You can also run program snippets that accomplish certain functions for you after you have set the zero postiom. It is possible to have a number of snippets loaded into the CNC's memory to accomplish this. The point is that there is more than one way to get things done with the CNC controller. Once your skill level increases doing so becomes second nature. You become one with the machine and your only concern is what is taking so long.

Dave