Sorry if the title is off a bit. Mostly wondering how many people have used mach to convert industrial sized machines and if they are happy with results. Seems like all the talk in the forums is about benchtop machines. Need to know if it can be trusted with a real machine. An unexplained crash might be a setback or a ruined part on a benchtop machine but on a 10,000+lb machine it could very costly and a serious safety concern.
We have two medium VMCs at work (40x20x20), one is a late 90's Taiwan machine with fanuc control and the other is a fairly new mazak. The mazak is awesome. Super fast, accurate, amazing control but of course is way over budget and power hungry for a garage machine. Something like the older mill with fanuc control might be affordable but its painfully slow. Does a terrible job cutting arcs at anything more then like 10 IPM, cuts more undersize the faster you go, It rounds out sharp corners, etc. 3d toolpaths are not accurate if you try to go fast, and it lags below programmed speed because it cant process the code fast enough anyway.
Im assuming that at least mach with eliminate these problems right? If i have decent AC servos and drives then i should get good accuracy at decent feed rates right? And there is plenty of look ahead so it shouldnt slow down in 3d moves right? Or am i thinking wrong?
If im thinking right, it should be fairly easy to get a high performance machine with no tool changer with mach. Of course you have to deal with the issue of toolchanger, but thats not an impossible goal and machine could be used with manual tool changes right away. But buying a working older machine in my budget probably means being stuck with a slow machine forever. Any thoughts? Am i understanding this correctly?