great thread Dave, been following with interest.  my knee mill has a bad control which I hope to get going with either mach or uccnc this spring when the garage thaws out.  just a comment which I hope will be helpful.  mine is a 10 x 50 acra mill with square ways, and it rapids at 70 ipm.  when I bought it, it was at 100 ipm, but I had some control issues and slowing it helped.  thought yours was moving slower than this, just a little input to help.  fwiw, mine has a rolled ballscrew driving the knee, with a pulley and belt where the knee handle would go.  worked great.

Thanks, in this case its not speed related but a glitch in code somewhere that does not like manual movement while in the M6 loop, code moves are ok if called in a M6 macro.

I still have the old screw in my knee, seems ok for now.

Thanks, does it work ok with CS's rigid tapping routine?

Never tryed:

Hmm.

There is another option just passed to me by a friend - have the machine make all the moves itself, ATC style, all i do is change the tool and press start.

I have most of the code in place for this, commented out, so i can try it easily.

One day it might get an ATC so could be well worth trying this.

The ePid only seems to come with manual moves so it may work.

here:

https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,29032.0.html

is a thread about the same Situation.

Thanks TPS, I think this just highlights some of the hidden things lurking behind Mach3 and external controllers / plugins - i guess once Mach development stalled, nothing could be done to fix them, and never will now.

I see the answer was to dump the xml and downgrade to 022 but that gave another issue with overrides it seems.


I tested the machine in pseudo-ATC mode today - let the machine make ALL the moves and i just change the tool - it works perfectly which is good and i can run with that now as its easier than reaching for the keyboard every tool change

Well, that was an educational, worthwhile couple of hours spent in Fusion....

I have some aluminium parts i make regularly, i do these on the high-speed setup using single-flute bits designed for aluminium. Run time is 26mins, paths created in Aspire.

I moved the part to Fusion, imported the DXF and run the CAM, same amount of tool changes, changed to 2-flute tools still recommended for aluminium. Run time 29:30.

Now, allowing for the massive drop in spindle speed from 24,000 to 4,000 I think that is very impressive, what helps is the two-flute tools plus the fact that due to the canted-out design of the high-speed head I have to baby the feed rates or it starts vibrating badly - no amount of fiddles seem to help this, you just have to go easy on it whereas with the main spindle I can whack the feeds up to proper limits - the tools are only 5mm and 2mm so she wouldn't even notice.

I need to do a test run to prove it but the other significant bonus is that i can use repeatable tooling instead of setting Z height 3 times for each part - this will likely save the lost 3 minutes

I was impressed anyway

Things are moving fast here

Now i need to engrave some aluminium parts, i'm thinking a drag-engraving tool for it?

Anyone know if you can output drag-engraving paths in Fusion?
They need the spindle off.

I've done a fair amount engraving. The results with
a v bit are always superior to anything I have found
so far.
Just my experience.
olf20 / Bob

I personally like to use a high speed rotary tool attached to the Z axis.
The Z axis should have no backlash and be very repeatable . Some work the cut depth is only a few thousands deep. I use several rotarys which run over the range of  18000 rpm to 65000 rpm. The higher ones are air driven.

Here is a link to some small engraving work done a long time ago.
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,13398.msg87957.html#msg87957

This link shows soom engraving done on custom mirrors for a chopper.
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,6187.msg40704.html#msg40704
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,6189.msg40706.html#msg40706

I don't use V bits since they just don't hold up well in metal  and the cut becomes wide very quickly limiting
size of the engraving. Play around trying different ways to cut engraving.

All depends on what you want to so. A friend uses a spring assisted drag tool and does does nice work with it.

Don't know what Fusion has available these days. No need for anything fancy as you can use 2d pathing for flat work.

RICH

Thanks, i have Fusion sorted.

Its just a matter of finding a tool that will give quick and easy results on aluminium, I have a reasonably fast spindle at 24k but find the micro engraving bits far too delicate - this is what made me look towards drag engraving. They use drag on Zippo lighter cases, was on TV the other day and the result was perfect, of course they didn't say what tool