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You also don't see many (any?) >3kw stepper motors. I'm not sure how much of an issue it is for turning and milling, but in grinding a servo is preferable as you can get 2000 pulses per rev while most steppers are 400 pulses. A servo can at least tell you it moved a certain distance, but you need a linear scale to actually show that it moved that much on the machine bed. We've got some custom machines running steppers and it mostly comes down to cost and availability when they were designed 20 years ago. If the same machines were designed today they'd absolutely have a servo. The AutomationDirect servo kits are re-packaged Delta's and pretty nice for the money. I just wish they'd offer the higher precision Delta drive instead of the mid-range.
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Oct 3, 2017 02:40
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You design parts for manufacturability, once you can manufacture a more complex part with less fixturing, then you'll do it to save setup and increase accuracy. People are doing 5 axis not because of crazy contours (some are) but because it can save a setup. The programs it spits out are not the sort you can troubleshoot at the machine. So you get a downward spiral where your operators need less knowledge to run the part while the software gets more complex. It's certainly much easier to use CAM than it was 10 years ago. Plus you get better results. At a certain point you'll solid model a part, upload it to the Kennametal cloud, pick your machine, and it'll spit out the most optimized code. But the dude on the shop floor needs to know even less. I toured a factory a few weeks ago that put raw motor castings in one end and the other end spit out fully assembled engines without a single person touching it. The machining centers were all linked with ceiling mounted Fanuc robots who shuttled the pallets from one 5 axis machine to the next. It was incredibly impressive to watch it all work. The level of expertise in the field right now is mind blowing, and at the same time distilled into fewer and fewer people than ever before. This isn't isolated to that one shop, a few other manufacturers I visited were dropping the customized production equipment and installing some truly monster 5 axis machines. At the end of the day it'll mean you can make cooler poo poo, even on a hobby cnc, with less knowledge of what's happening under the hood.
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Dec 18, 2017 02:02
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Mudfly posted:What do you guys think of the future of machine shops that are all manual? Excavator repairs / whatever. Will their always be a market for repairing tools quickly on manual machines, or will they end up just going back to the manufacturer for a swap out part? It'll just become more and more niche. One example is the OEM's are getting into a ton of repair that would've previously been done by dealers/locals. The OE's can do it cheaper, at a higher quality level, with a warranty, where the previous folks couldn't. The niche usually being it's either so big, it's not cost effective to haul it back to OEMland, or as EvilBeard says, the OE has moved on to greener pastures. One local shop here still uses almost exclusively manual equipment but the owners creed for machining work is "if you can lift it, I won't bid on it." All he does is massive stuff. 80 lbs is about where his work starts all the way up to massive ore boat and mining stuff. His shop is flourishing and he can't hire enough people. We used to have this retired machinist do a lot of piece work for us. He did it basically because he enjoyed it and got bingo money or some poo poo. You'll always be competing against a dude like that unless you find a nice niche.
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Dec 21, 2017 03:45
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Anyone have any experience with Centroid? Looking at a custom application and need something with reliable analog inputs tied to a custom macro.
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Mar 5, 2020 20:28
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