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April 2010 Through May 2010 CNC Blog Archive
5/25/10 Is Carbide Always Faster? I have had several people ask why the chiploads for HSS are higher than Carbide all other things being equal in G-Wizard. After all, isn't Carbide always faster? Well not always. Carbide is much stiffer than HSS, and this can be helpful to reduce chatter or with longer reaches. This is why we can use longer boring bars and endmills if they're solid carbide. However, if vibration is not a problem, this stiffness is offset by Carbide being more brittle than HSS. For that reason, it can't take as big a chipload without chipping, all other things being equal. This is more than made up for in many situation's by Carbides ability to run at much higher surface speeds. Even with a lower chipload, we can run higher feedrates, provided we can maintain the spindle speeds needed for those feedrates. I thought it would be interesting to compile the trade off data from G-Wizard into a chart so you can see graphically where each one excels:
Regions where HSS vs Carbide has a better material removal rate due to a higher feedrate... As you can see, if your spindle is only capable of running at 4000 rpm or less, HSS has a higher material removal rate, all other things being equal. This is because the higher chipload of HSS allows a higher feedrate. But, HSS for this 1/2" endmill case, maxes out at a 4000 rpm recommended spindle speed. If you can go faster than that you can beat the HSS material removal rate. In fact, there is a "dead zone" from 4000 to about 5000 rpm where the carbide is catching up to the HSS's early lead, so it would be more fair to say 5000 rpm is the dividing line for this scenario. This is not to say that there would never be an advantage below 5000 rpm to carbide. Remember, it is more rigid than HSS. If you're having a lot of trouble with chatter or deflection, perhaps because you have a long reach tool, carbide may help quite a bit. This is also 6061 aluminum. Even mild steel is going to shift the tradeoff to much lower rpms because HSS can only be run much more slowly in harder materials. 5/23/10 Limit/Home Switch Noise I recently got my Home Switches going and decided to go ahead and enable them to act as limit switches too. That's when I became aware of just how much noise there was on the lines. I was getting a gratuitous limit fault from noise about every 2 to 3 minutes. No worries, I did what I should have done to start and grounded the foil inside my cables to the CNC electronics cabinet via their connector. The noise went away immediately and life has been good since. If you didn't think you had much noise in your system, maybe its because you didn't have a way to check? Ground the cables at the electronics cabinet end (not the machine end, that can create ground loops). Mach3 Users: Make all of your Accelerations the Same on your Axes! I discovered this was a problem while making my tapping arms. Due to the high rate of feed (50 IPM) and some abrupt changes of direction to follow the profile, I hadn't really encountered the problem before. I had heard on one individual having an issue with wildly different motor tuning on a knee versus his X and Y axis. It had been said this was a bug in Mach. In any event, as I discovered early in my machining of the axis arms, it isn't a good idea to have different accelerations on two axes. I wouldn't have noticed it had it not been for easing back the accel on the X axis because it was faulting too much when I run with two 6" vises on the table. I lowered the X axis accel to match the Z and forgot about it. This latest job making a tapping arm reminded me in short order that something needed tending to. It seems odd to me that Mach3 doesn't account for this, and it ought to be classified as a bug. Mach's trajectory planner should be able to properly choreograph a coordinated move across n-axes with a different acceleration and top velocity on each. If nothing else, the lazy algorithm would simply limit all the coordinated axes to the least acceleration and velocity of any axis involved at the time. In any event, if you think you're doing yourself a favor by finding each axis's maximum performance envelope, you might in fact be doing the opposite until Mach learns to deal with it better. BTW, the symptom will be that the tool follows the coordinated move's path in a very sloppy way. Going around the pivot point on the tapping arm swing block it was painfully obvious to the naked eye something was wrong--no calipers or micrometers needed. 5/22/10 50 IPM Passes on the Tapping Arm I got some work done on the tapping arm project yesterday afternoon. I made the two swing blocks that are the uprights in the parallelogram linkage. Here is what the overall arm will be:
The swing blocks are the red parts... While making the swing blocks, I wanted to play with some faster milling feeds that use radial chip thinning. Being able to do the speeds and feeds calculations to maximize performance is one of the reasons I started writing G-Wizard. I've got some limitations given that my mill only has a 1600 rpm top spindle speed--pretty darned slow for aluminum. That was going to seriously limit the top end of what I could accomplish. To pick up the speed while profiling the swing blocks, I did a couple of things. First, I used a 1/2" corncob rougher which can sail through the work a little faster. Second, I used a HSS 4 flute. I need more spindle speed to make a carbide endmill fly, but I've got decent juice for high speed steel. Running 4 flutes instead of 2 is like doubling your rpm, so in effect, I can go as if I had a 2 flute in a 3200 rpm spindle--still not very fast, but faster. You can only use 4 flutes in aluminum when there is plenty of chip clearance. In this case, I'm profiling around the outside, so its no problem. If I was slotting, I would want to stick to 2 or 3 flutes. Lastly, a set up a radial chip finning cut that was 0.125" deep but nearly full cutter diameter high. Any time your width of cut is less than 1/2 the cutter's diameter, you can start cranking up the feedrate due to chip thinning. The end result was a 50 IPM profiling run:
Flying along at 50IPM to rough the Swing Blocks. As you can see, it ran pretty smooth, with no chatter or other problems. Most of the noise is the gearhead itself. I can't wait to do a belt drive conversion, just a couple more projects before I start on that. A couple of things to note: - I'm using Koolmist, and perhaps a bit more fluid than I really need. Hard to fine tune the Noga mister. You need to use some form of fluid at these speeds for lubrication, else the aluminum will stick to the cutter and things go downhill in a hurry after that. I've seen that happen at these higher rates of machining, though I often run dry when I'm not pushing it. The one thing I don't like about the mist is it makes the chips clump together. There's more recutting of chips going on here than I would like due to that. I need a second air blast nozzle to really get rid of them. - You can see steam flying off the milling operation at various points. You'd think things are hotter than heck and the cutter is not long for this world. But, all that heat is in the chips, not the cutter. It was room temperature to the touch immediately after I finished the pass. - This cutter was not even working hard, but you can tell the hardest part of the cut is in those inside corners if you listen to the sound. If I had more spindle rpm and could go faster, I might want to consider slowing down a bit in those corners. Of course that's what high speed machining tool paths like trochoidal milling do automatically. Fun stuff to see a low-end mill like this cutting a little more aggressively. Each Swing Block ran for just under 10 minutes to completion. I didn't show the whole thing in the video, but there was a lot of air cutting at the beginning. If I was going to make a bunch of these, I would want to find a way to get my CAM program to quit doing that. More details on the Tapping Arm Page for those who are interested, including the g-codes if you want to try one yourself. 5/18/10 Gang Tool a Turret Clever idea to get an extra ID tool in a turret (there's never enough slots):
Think of it as a gang tool slide on your turret... Way to Get Social, Okuma and Sandvik! I just came across the Okuma Winner's Blog, thanks to a thread on PM by the winner. What's going on here? Just some clever tried and true marketing tactics well applied to the Social Web. Seems that Okuma gave away one of their machines for 2 years to a deserving (in their opinion) shop based on a contest to describe what they would do with such a machine. Very cool. Contests are a good way to get interested prospects to participate and build your mailing lists. But then they took a cool next step--they gave the winner a blog and asked him to write about his experiences with the machine. That's pretty cool. They say your customers are your best salespeople. Well Okuma is just putting forward this "customer" front and center to tell his story. I'll bet one of the things they were looking for as they reviewed the contest entries was evidence that each contestant could tell a good story. The submission was in the form of a YouTube video telling the story, and the winner has a great "Black Hole" story about needing to replace an old machine. Not only does Okuma get that voice talking about their products, but the winner also gets tons of coverage, which has to be good for their business to--a classic "win-win". And of course, the runner's up also get some coverage and their story is told too! BTW, that winner was Charles Blair's Doraville Custom Machine Services of Lawrenceville, Georgia. One of the hardest things for marketers to come up with is great content, especially from customers. Okuma has gotten themselves a treasure trove of it for the cost of one machine borrowed for two years. I'd call that a good investment. It's interesting to see how some of these companies in the Machining industry are leveraging the Internet. I'm currently about halfway through Sandvik's home study course on metal cutting. Tons and tons of valuable information is given away and a great textbook on CD. You have to participate by taking tests on each chapter. I think their only goal there is to make sure you actually read and absorbed some of the material. But, if you don't take the tests, they simply bill you $150 at the end of the 6 month period. So, in some sense, they hold you hostage to reading their marketing material. It's actually a lot nicer than that, because the material is good content and not typical marketing spam. Yet, alongside all of the good informative information, it also introduces a fair number of Sandvik products and it leaves you with the impression they know what the heck they're doing if you didn't already think so anyway. Plus, if you actively participate by taking the tests you get all that good knowledge for free. There are a lot of innovative ways to use the Internet for marketing, and machinists are on line. You'd probably be surprised to know that this site, CNCCookbook, gets between 30 and 40,000 unique visitors per month. This is evenly divided between direct accesses (meaning someone typed in or followed their bookmark to the site), search engines, and referalls from other sites. That's telling me a whole lot of machinists are online and actively looking for something to read or answers to questions they may have! 5/17/10 The Swing-Away Tailstock A fourth axis can lead to tight quarters inside a mill enclosure. Enter the swing-away tailstock. Nikken tailstocks for fourth axis work have a swing way feature:
The tailstock up and ready for action...
And here it is down and out of the way so the part can be loaded... Thanks to Boris on the PM board for pointing this out! What Are the Best Toolholders? According to Google Analytics, one of the most popular pages on this site is the one about surface finish for milling. As a result, I am busy updating the page to include a bunch of newer information I've come across since I first wrote it. For example, as part of the research, I recently read a fascinating analysis of toolholder efficacy in a graduate thesis out of the University of British Colombia ("Mechanics and Dynamics of the Toolholder Spindle Interface") that raised some good data I hadn't seen before: - HSK toolholders are as much as 4x stiffer than equivalent sized CAT40 holders. This is mainly due to the dual-face contact of the HSK design. More interesting was the comparison of the performance of milling chucks, shrink fit, hydraulic chucks,and collet chucks. The most important characteristic for finishing operations is modal stiffness. In order of best to worst performance, here is how the different toolholders ranked:
Surprising that the lowly collet chuck performed nearly as well as finicky shrink fit tooling and quite a bit better than more expensive hydraulic and power chuck-style holders! However where roughing is concerned, the Dynamic Stiffness is important for suppressing chatter. For maximum material removal rates, we want to maximize Dynamic Stiffness. Here the Collet Chuck also performs pretty darned well, and it is in hogging out lots of material that the hydraulic and milling chuck style holders start to come into their own. Lemme see, looks like I need to order some more collet chucks! 5/15/10 Rolling Into a Cut Here's a great tip, courtesy of Sandvik, with a hat tip to Don "Milacron" at the PM Boards. This Sandvik video explains the gist of it:
I'm fascinated by these geometric effects. Chip thinning is another. Isn't it interesting how Mother Nature tends to like circles better than straight lines? Chip thinning, rolling into a cut, and the trochoidal paths of high speed maching are all about the behavior of circles as we try to use them (in the form of rotating cutters) to cut the straight lines that we humans are more comfortable with. Circles are more gentle and natural in these applications. Here is another look at the geometry:
Not the chip shape to the right of the feed line (the red line is the path the cutter follows): thin chips on exit are better! To execute an entry like this means starting the cutter out one radius to the right of the original starting location and then rolling it in along a path that is an arc with the same radius as the cutter. The folks on PM report that this works as well for endmills as it does for the face mills Sandvik shows in their video. In fact, they say it really helps improve cutter life on materials like Stainless Steel. 5/11/10 I almost forgot: Shop Air! Somehow or other, I forgot to mention that I got a new compressor and shop air plumbing into operation last month. I now have a nice quiet Eaton 5HP 2 stage compressor installed in a room completely separate from my shop:
Way better and quieter than the Craftsman I had been putting up with, and tons more air to boot! The system is plumbed in black pipe and there are outlets all over the shop. When I need air, I just flick a switch:
For those who are curious about more detail, there is a full write up on the Shop Air page. Next Project: Tapping Arm Having finished my home switch project for the CNC mill, I started thinking about what my next project ought to be. I wanted something simple but very useful that would combine a little CNC with a little welding and fabrication. A tapping arm is perfect for that task as I was reminded when reading a recent thread of Hoss's over on the CNCZone. In case you've never seen a tapping arm, they work like this:
I've had one in the planning stages for a while, to the extent that I have a page devoted to it. It should look something like this when I finish:
5/10/10 Great Small Business Book: The Referral Engine I loved John Jantsch's book, "The Referral Engine". Like the book jacket says, it's about teaching your business to market itself. It's funny, but I expected the book to be about something else from the title. I guess I had visions of multi-level marketing when I heard the word "referral". While the strategies and tactics the book espouses would be very effective for MLM, they will also be effective with any business. In fact, a great many very successful businesses are doing just exactly what Jantsch proposes. What's really different here? There is a growing consensus (finally), that the Old School marketing approach of simply browbeating customers into buying is no longer working very well. Send them enough spam, make them watch enough Super Bowl ads, control the shelf space at the super market so they have fewer choices, and they will buy. Businesses with this mindset (and it is still the prevailing view) think that their biggest problem is figuring out how to extend the consumer enough credit to buy even more. But as I said, it's not working. Newer generations are growing up savvy to it and older generations are tired of it. The Internet above all has made it easy for everyone to see more choice and to tell each other what they think about the companies they deal with. Carpet bombing ad campaigns are seen as less and less effective in the wake of all this. Jantsch provides an alternative with his Referral Engine concept. His proposition is that great companies have great customers who will help you get the word out. The book is all about how to treat customers so they care in the first place, and then how to get systematic about enrolling their help. Like a lot of great business books, it is a quick read, but one that is chock full of great idea bites. You'll want to either keep a highlighter handy or plan to go back through the book to find ideas directly applicable to your business. Since getting into the whole Internet thing professionally, I've made a real study of the Social Dynamics. There is a "give to get" mentality there that is needed for best success. People often ask me what the secrets are to doing business on the Internet, and there are two things I tell them. First is that there really are no big strategic secrets. The Internet is just people, so treat it like you would people and you'll be okay. The second is the "give to get" thing. Authors like John Jantsch and Seth Godin (another of my favorites) have made give to get into a real platform for doing business. Companies like 37Signals or Smugmug have built this mindset deep into their cultural DNA. For many small businesses, operating this way is entirely instinctive. It may not occur to them that everybody doesn't automatically know how to do it. "The Referral Engine," simply deconstructs "give to get" in a very readable and approachable way to try to break it down into a system that one could implement for their business in a systematic way. What are real world examples of give to get? We're all familiar with companies like Zappos or Netflix. They're definitely in the give to get business in terms of how they treat people. But one could conclude that these are very large companies that have the benefit of huge budgets. Will it work for smaller companies? Of course! Jantsch illustrates numerous examples throughout the book. Stories like: - A remodeling contractor that would offer to throw an Open House so the homeowners could show off their new remodel after every project. - A painting contractor that sent each customer that referred another customer a hand-written thank you note together with a lottery ticket. - A window washing company whose employees did such a great job customers always felt compelled to tip them. Whenever that happened, the employee would pull out three referral post cards and ask the customer to address and sign them on the spot. So much of the referral business is knowing when to ask and how to ask your customers for referrals. As all of the examples above point out, it's give to get. You can't ask until the customer is feeling generous. When you do get to that point, there is a very narrow window of time, and you have to ask in a way that provides maximum convenience or even more giving to the customer. Importantly, each section of the book ends with a point-by-point action plan framework any business can use to give it a try. Highly recommended! 5/7/10 Shopmade Jet Engines Someday I want to try my hand at making a little gas turbine (jet engine). In many ways, these are some of the most demanding machining applications you will find. They are similar to machine spindles (another demanding application) in the sense that they are rotating and require precise and durable bearings, but they are harder in the sense that they spin very very fast and involve a lot of heat as well. There are shortcuts available, however. Rather than build a turbine from scratch, one can adapt a turbocharger from a car or truck to the application. The high heat/high rpm rotating assembly is then already taken care of. Still not an easy project, but much more doable. If nothing else, these monsters are impressive to watch. Here are a couple videos for your entertainment:
Is it just me, or do these things look like they're ready to explode at any moment?
You don't have to be Jay Leno to have a jet propelled motorcycle!
Bunch of Bubbas in a Garage with Beer and an Old Turbo: Git 'er done! (Love the red hot tailpipe and the oil so hot it is smoking: Guys says not enough fuel?!??)
Scratch built from plans... 5/7/10 Yaskawa Has the Mojo I correspond with a lot of machinists who bring me ideas for this blog or otherwise just want to talk over something they see here. My post on Yaskawa vs "Hobby" servos shook loose an interesting one. This is a machinist I've had a lot of great discussions with who does a lot of retrofits. One of his special niches (every shop needs a special niche the competitors can't go!) is that his machines are simply bigger than the others nearby. If you have a rush job needing 60 inches of travel on a mill, he's the man you have to talk to. He's gotten a lot of these machines together by retrofiting older machines. In response to my Yaskawa musings, he wanted to point out that there are a lot of intangibles that the raw specifications don't speak to. He went through an evolution of sorts on the retrofitting. First he went with big steppers. Like any successful machine shop, he's cranking out tons of parts. That's how you make machine tools print money. As he puts it:
The CNCZone crowd are fond of saying that a properly designed stepper system never loses steps, so there are no advantages to servos. I've had one of the leading luminaries in stepper drive design say that you can clearly hear when a stepper motor has dropped steps. He's a great stepper drive designer (he really is, his drives are awesome), but he is not a machinist. Heck, I'm lucky to hear myself think when a big machine gets to moving some chips big time, let alone hear whether some stepper briefly squealed a little bit differently. Imagine just losing 1 or 2 steps on every 2nd or 3rd part all day long. That's how you get to be off 5 or 10 thou at the end of the day. I've also had my servos fault often enough, and known why they faulted, to be completely confident that peeps are losing steps out there from time to time, whether or not they want to admit it. Get a gib acting too tight due to not enough lube or junk in the ways like my machinist friend mentions and that's all it takes. The machine will overcome it in many cases rather than stalling, but you've already lost the step. So you're off by the end of the day. Crap. From steppers, he went on to the "Hobby Grade" DC servos with brushes and all. I'll let him tell the story again:
I can imagine the Tagamet. Rushing to get a job done, behind the 8 ball, and the machine is not working right after it always had. It's like having a car that breaks down right when you need it most. Drives you crazy. The comments about type of connector and their reliability are spot on. When you think about it, these servos and steppers live in a pretty nasty environment. Metal chips are flying everywhere, and will short out a contact in an instant. The airwaves are rife with electrical noise from the VFD on the main spindle to the guy that fires up the welder at the other end of the shop. Coolant is pooling around these bad boys hour after hour, are we running a machine tool or a submarine? And there is no rest. Got to grind out the parts constantly. No time for preventative maintenance to speak of. Run it until it breaks and then fix it ASAP. As my friend puts it, a lot of hobby systems are a cascade of "it will work" type thinking. Not the result of " let's build the best" type thinking. It really does make a difference. Yaskawas have the mojo, they are the best, and that's why so many machines use them. 5/6/10 Small Business Musings There are a great many small business owners and employees reading the CNC Cookbook. I correspond regularly with a number of you, and appreciate your ideas and insights. By way of giving something back, I'm going to start writing from time to time about some things I think will be helpful to the business side. I'm not giving up any of the machining articles, fear not, this is just a little something extra I'll be adding. There's a lot more of this kind of thing over on my other blog, which is called Smoothspan. You're welcome to get connected with Smoothspan. I may repeat some of its content here, but my intent is to try to provide information that's more directly relevant to small machining and manufacturing businesses whereas Smoothspan is all about Silicon Valley High Tech Startups and the Software Industry. I've founded 3 businesses from scratch and joined 2 others that were pretty small to start. I'm a software engineer by training, but along the way I've learned a lot about the business side and made a study of it. I've also been pretty successful (e.g. "Lucky", LOL), so I suspect some of this stuff really works. When you're part of a small business, "Who you gonna call?" That's right, you're the "go to" guy who has to figure it out, because there is no one else to call. As such, we all wear lots of hats and we all have to be Starters to git 'er done. So, even if you're not the one in your small business who is directly responsible for some of these things, keep your ears open. You never know when that could change because the business needs more help, or because its time for you to start your own small business. Okay, here is my first installment along these lines: Blogs for Business Matters If you're reading the CNCCookbook, I assume you like to find interesting content on the web. I read a bunch of blogs to keep myself informed. They're like my morning paper, and in fact, I read them pretty religiously each morning. As I am writing this, I have subscribed to 183 different blogs. That's a ridiculous amount of information, and that's fine by me. Each morning I leaf through the headlines and only read the ones that are of interest. The rest are deleted--there will be plenty more where they came from! It's kind of like trying to keep up with all the posts on CNCZone, Practical Machinist, and all the rest of the machinist boards I follow. Over time you get a sense of what interests you have and it's easy to skip the rest. To kick us off, let me suggest three blogs that I think might be particularly helpful to small machining and manufacturing businesses: These guys run a company called 37Signals, which is a great bootstrapped software company. Bootstrapped means they took no Venture Capital, which is how most small businesses in this country start. They're written a couple of wonderful books on how they go about starting and building businesses which are bestsellers and quick and easy reads. I'm just finishing up their latest, which is called "Rework." It's very much worth your time to check it out. A typical current post on the blog is "Accentuate the Positive", which tells how to deliver essentially bad news to a customer ("No, I am not going to lower my price") in a very upbeat way that is much better. How can a machinist go wrong with a title like that? You can do anything with duct tape, right? This is John Jantsch's blog, and is squarely aimed at helping small businesses to market and sell. There's a ton of good advice in his writings, and he has a new book coming out that I was asked to preview. It's called The Referral Engine, and it is excellent. I'll publish the review of it next week, but a little preview can be had here. Seth Godin is one of my favorite reads. First, he is a very very smart man, one of the top 5 marketers I've encountered, and he is totally focused on marketing for small businesses. Second, he takes almost no time to read. His posts are short and sweet, and they nearly always give you something to think about for your own business. As a guy who you know from reading this blog is probably too long-winded, I'll provide his post, "All the news that fits", as a good place to start with Seth. Check him out. 5/2/10 Optical Home/Limit Switches for the IH Mill I finished installing and testing the optical home/limit switches on my IH Mill:
X-axis home/limit switch... More detail is available on the project page. These little beauties will save me considerable time! Machinist's Hammers A pretty common beginner's project in the machine shop is a brass hammer. But here is what happens when a more experienced hand makes a hammer:
Long nylon face is for installing pistons...
That is one sweet hammer! Diamond Knife Sharpener While we're on the subject of nice shopmade tools, check out the cool diamond knife sharpener:
Put a high quality commercial diamond wheel to work and your pocket knife will be razor sharp in no time! You gotta love massively over-engineered and finely crafted shopmade tooling! Bodysnatcher's 5C Collet Indexer Bodysnatcher is a professional machinist I've been following over on CNCZone. He has a lathe similar to mine, and has made all sorts of interesting tooling for it. These photos are of a 5C collet indexer he made (comments are his):
Build Photos (click to enlarge):
4/30/10 Making a Lathe Compound from Scratch This was an enjoyable video I came across:
I might follow a similar approach to make a gang slide for my Lathemaster 9x30. Clever Thread Cutting Gadget Microprocessors and computers enable great simplification of mechanisms and the addition of lots of functionality that would have been impractical or expensive. Consider how much more your handheld iPod MP-3 player can do versus an Old School Jukebox. The same is true in the machining world. A CNC mill or lathe offers endless flexibility compared to the manual equivalent, and often requires less tooling to boot. Consider, for example, that no rotary table is needed to cut curves with a CNC mill. No taper attachment is needed to cut tapers on a CNC lathe. Along comes a clever device for threading:
As you can see from the video, its basically a purpose-built thread milling machine. He spins the round workpiece in the 3-jaw chuck, the thread mill has its own simple right angle spindle (just an ordinary die grinder modified), and a micro-controller of some kind allows arbitrary threads to be entered so that steppers will advance the thread mill at the appropriate feedrate to cut any desired thread pitch. Cool beans! Now the question for this poster is how best to monetize their invention. I wonder what sort of applications would find the machine particularly suitable? Certainly plumbers and pipe fitters cut a lot of threads using taps and dies. Would they prefer a machine like this? Not clear. Machine shops will already have plenty of ways to cut threads, so I'm not sure they'd be a good market. If you've got a good idea for a market for this fellow's product, head over to CNCZone (the link attached to "poster") and tell him what you think. "Pro" vs "Hobby" Servos How different are the performance specs of "Pro" vs "Hobby" servos? I've heard a lot of claims, but it's easy enough just to go look at the published specs. Here, I'll take a Yaskawa 750W Sigma-5 AC Servo (typical axis drive for a Haas VMC) against the HomeshopCNC 850 oz-in DC servos I have installed on my IH mill. Here's what I get from the respective (linked) spec pages: - Power: Yaskawa = 750W / HomeshopCNC = 612W (a little smaller servo) - Peak Torque (oz-in): Yaskawa = 1184 / HomeshopCNC = 850 - Max Speed: Yaskawa = 6000 rpm / HomeshopCNC = 4200 rpm - Voltage: Yaskawa = 200V AC / HomeshopCNC = 72V DC One interesting figure is to take the power consumption of the two and equalize what the torque should be from the HomeshopCNC were it to consume 750W. That value is 1042 oz-in, which is still less than the 1184 oz-in from the Yaskawa. AC servos are known to be more efficient, and that sort of quantifies it a little bit at 12-15% more efficient in producing torque for a given amount of power. This is all just out of idle curiousity and interest. 4/28/10 Why Do I Have to Know a Range of SFM's and Chiploads? Saw a great question over on CNCZone this morning. A beginner was trying to understand why so many cutter manufacturers publish ranges of surface speed (SFM) and chipload (inches per tooth) values for their cutters. I suspect his broader question was how to know what number in the range to use when calculating the feeds and speeds of his specific machining operation. He also couldn't understand why the calculator software he was using also had to know the range. After all, it's a computer, doesn't it just know the right answer? Here was my response: Your need to know the SFM depends. The ranges of surface speed are quoted because there is a range of cutting conditions. The more your calculator can take those conditions into account, the less you need to look at it as a range. -------------------------------- As an aside, a great deal of the information and tools machinists use are based on approximations and rules of thumb. These approximations simplify what we have to know about what is actually an extremely complex science. I've been taking Sandvik's graduate course in metal cutting technology and theory (highly recommended, BTW), and there's a lot going on! But, the approximations also hold us back from the potential that's possible. The approximations start from the idea that old school-taught spindle rpm and feedrate formulas tell the whole story. Of course they don't. Consider the number of approximations that make up the average pocketing operation in 6061 aluminum: - We may be assuming the simple feedrate and rpm formulas are enough. But varying the axial or radial depth of cut matters a lot, as do geometric variables like chip thinning and whether we're climb or conventional milling. - We assume constant cutter engagement, unless our CAM software supports high speed machining toolpaths like Surfcam and similar strategies. Just look at what a huge difference that makes. Without it, all the speeds and feeds have to assume worst case corner engagement is the norm throughout the cut. - We assume all carbide cutters with a particular coating are the same. - We assume all VMC's, coolants, and all setups are the same in terms of rigidity. The list goes on. The challenge in really optimal machining performance is to get our arms around all these variables and account for them. The more variables your software and experience can take into account, the closer you'll get to the ideal. In this world of thin manufacturing and machining profit margins, its worth it to try to take more variables into account than the other guy can. Why use a fancy feeds and speeds calculator like G-Wizard? Why use CAM software with the best possible toolpaths? Same reasons--because in the end they give you control over more variables to get a more optimal result. 4/27/10 Kluber's Magic Spindle Bearing Grease Since having published the details of where to obtain it in small quantity (directly off their web store), I've seen a number of folks over on CNCZone pick up a tube. One fellow (gd.marsh on CNCZone) is now testing the spindle on his Chinese mill to 8000 rpm--cool beans! After seeing all this, I finally place my own order for a tube of the magic grease. I'll be using it on my IH mill belt drive project, when I finally get to it. You want Kluber Isoflex NBU 15. It ain't cheap--about $30 with shipping for a 50G tube--so what makes its so magical? This diagram will serve to illustrate:
Bearing Speed Factor for 7207 AC Bearings Showing Grease vs Oil Lubrication Regimes Those "dN" numbers are called "bearing speed factors." They basically tell us how well the lubrication is working on the bearing, and hence how many rpm it can turn. That diagram shows the normal regime for grease versus a need to go to an oil mist system. Most recent VMC's are using oil mist, BTW. Anyway, the magic of Kluber Isoflex NBU 15 is that it has a BSF of 850,000 dN rather than the normal 400,000 dN found with most greases. That 7207 is the bearing size my IH mill takes for its spindle. With ordinary grease, the absolute redline would be 8K rpm and realistically I should probably hold it to 6,000 to 6,500 or so. It's no wonder this is the speed range for Bridgeport mills and the like too. However, with the magic Kluber grease, much higher speeds become practical. 8,000 or even 10000 is doable. Since dynamically balanced tooling is recommended at 10,000 or up, I doubt I'll be running there, but 8,000 rpm would be sweet. A whole raft of the earlier CNC mills, like the Tree Journeyman series, as well as more recent VMC's took 8,000 rpm as their target speed and its a good one for aluminum work. My IH mill will only do 1600 rpm with the current gearbox. If I could run it at 8,000 rpm I could literally be feeding my programs 5x faster in many cases. Sheesh, I may need to look at tuning up my servos so I can get my positioning up from its current 120 IPM. More Shaper Tricks on a CNC Mill: Cutting Splines I continue to be amazed, entertained, and intrigued when I see Simpson36's work with his fancy 4th axis rig on his scratch-built mill. His latest is showing how to cut splines and other fairly exotic shapes using a lathe tool lashed to the side of the mill head:
Something to note: this is a very cool capability, but don't try to attach the tool to the spindle directly. You don't want to be bashing your spindle bearings on each stroke. Build a holder that affixes to the side of the head. 4/24/10 A Chuck Hauler... One of my readers (thanks, Pablo), sent me a link to this great idea over on the Candlepower forums. Lots of interesting stuff over on Candlepower, BTW. Folks over there are making custom high-tech flashlights, and a lot of the work is really cool. This idea is designed to make it easier to mount medium-sized chucks on your lathe. Take a look at what I'm calling a "Chuck Hauler":
The chuck goes on the hauler like this. You can grab the bar on either side of the chuck to use both hands...
Place the hauler onto your lathe's ways. The hardwood base protects the ways from harm...
Line up the bar with the spindle bore and slide the chuck into position. Pretty slick! For really heavy chucks you're going to want some sort of overhead hoist system. In fact, the hoist will even come in handy for loading large workpieces. Here is a nice shot of Ray Behner's setup from PM:
Cradle for round stock, and a little piston unit on the hook for fine positioning. Just open the value to gently lower the workpiece. Note the disc brake and indexing by the chuck! 4/22/10 Another Use for a Dual Indicator Rig (aka Traminator) I love my "Traminator" (what I call the dual indicator tramming tool I received as a gift), but had thought of it as a very special purpose tool only useful for tramming the mill until I saw this picture on a Practical Machinist thread:
Ray Behner created this tool, and what a cool idea it is! It's shown here tramming a vise, but I can imagine it would be handy to align almost anything into tram on the mill table. It's going to be faster to tap it in this way too I would think since you don't have to wait to sweep the indicator (although I'm pretty fast at it these days, so it won't save much). Now I need a precision rig that will hold my Traminator at right angles so I can use it for jobs like this. I'll have to think about it a touch, but doesn't seem it ought to be too hard to make. BTW, if you don't recall the Traminator, you'll recognize it from the picture:
My tramming and preventative maintenance gear... 4/19/10 A Couple of Very Cool 4th Axis Videos I've been watching this fellow for a little while now, and he has just released two new videos:
Being able to lock the axis opens up some possibilities, like slotting keyways. I've been thinking about this possibility for a while, though not in conjunction with a 4th axis...
Love the two speed belt drive too!
4/15/10 Finally, a New G-Wizard Release Not that anyone was complaining, but I feel better for having finally gotten a new G-Wizard release together. It was held up waiting for some data to be recovered from my disk crash. I had a pretty nearly complete version but wanted to start from a completely up to date version. This version is mostly bug fixes, but there is a new feature inspired by Gibbscam to facilitate metric and Imperial peaceful coexistence. In most of the fields you can now enter a number and follow it with an "i" or an "m". If you type the "i", it assumes you have entered inches and want to convert it to mm. If you entered "m", it assumes you have entered mm and want to convert it to inches. Surprising how convenient this is to have, thank Jon! Eventually, I will also add Gibbscam's ability to enter an expression in any field. More on that when it is available. Meanwhile, I need to get my new Seagate Black Armor backup system running. I had been running a La Cie Big Disk, but it died just exactly one month before my hard disk failed. Must be some edition of Murphy's Law involved there! 4/13/10 Kurt Vises for Sheet Metal Bending (aka Way Covers) Kurt-style vises have 1001 uses, I am sure. Maybe this is 1002. Having my nice set of Vise Jaws of Doom sitting on the table from an engraving project gave me an idea. Could they be used as a sheet metal brake? You betcha! Here are the jaws:
Here they are being used to bend with the aid of some clamps and a handy piece of cast iron that was waiting idly for another project:
And here is the finished way cover (bottom Y cover):
Not quite as nice as it would have been with a real brake, but I'm pretty happy with the result. It would be so easy to make a simple attachment so I could use those jaws as a real brake too. Hmmm... 4/12/10 Cutting Oiling Grooves When You Don't Have a Second Mill Those of you who read this blog and have followed my IH CNC Conversion efforts will know I really love my one shot oiling modification. It makes the mill run so much better. I had the luxury of having 2 IH mills, so I could use one to mill the grooves on the ways of the other. For those not so fortunate, Flenser shows how easy it is to mill those grooves with just a little ingenuity:
Slotting a piece of wood so it will follow the dovetail ways...
Mount your Dremel or other tool to the block...
And here is how the block mates to the ways... Pretty clever work. Probably not effective on chromed ways (too hard!), but this will do on most cast iron ways to put in an oiling groove. All that remains is to drill the cross passages. Now everyone can experience the joys of one shot oiling without too much trouble. BTW, there is a significant problem here. Namely, we actually need a mail, not a female guide block because the oil grooves go on the saddle, not the main ways. Measure twice and cut once on this kind of work! 4th Axis Disk Brake Nice video of a disk brake to lock a 4th axis for machining:
The caliper works by screw action. The cylinder rotates a screw that snugs the brake pad on the rotor. This is a very high performance shopmade 4th axis. The servo will spin it fast enough he can use it as a lathe. This is an earlier version making an air fitting:
His project log is over on the Mach forum. 4/11/10 Machine Tuning as Preventative Maintenance I like to fiddle a bit with my machines every now and again to make sure they're adjusted to tip top condition. The CNC mill seems to benefit from this the most. For example, the gibbs and sometimes the Mach3 motor tuning parameters benefit from periodic adjustment. Perhaps surprisingly, the tuning varies depending on conditions. When its cold (like it is right now in my area), the mill is stiffer and seems to require lighter settings. When I load the table with two 6" Kurt vises there is enough weight to slow it down too. Right now I have the combination of both, so things are kind of "worst case", at least until I decide to throw a cylinder block up on the table and try to machine on that! In addition, Z is the most sensitive (being the heaviest), followed by X, followed by Y. So my current settings, which I regard as a worst case, are as follows: X 110 IPM, 10 acceleration I generally just leave Z right where it is. However, if the weather is warm and the table is lightly loaded, I may bump X up to 120 and 15. It's concievable things can be made to run faster, but I like to keep my gibs very tight as well. BTW, they sometimes need readjusting too. The original owner of IH, Aaron Moss, once told me he retuned his gibbs every season. I can definitely believe that. Something else that helps is a machine warmup. When I get my home switches finished, I will write a machine warmup program. The idea is to move the axes through their full range of travel for a period of time, and warm up the spindle bearings as well. This practice is common on full-sized VMC's, and there is no reason it wouldn't be helpful for my little mill too. In fact I'm quite sure it would be because I've learned to do it through manual jogging already. It would be even nicer to have a program run while I pump the oiler every so often to make sure plenty of way oil is being spread over all the surfaces. 4/10/10 Sandvik Metal Cutting Course Sandvik has a great deal on a home study course on metal cutting. It's based on the excellent textbook "Modern Metal Cutting." It's a great deal because they give you a CD-ROM copy for free if you complete the course within 6 months. I just got my CD in the mail today and I've started the course. The historical section is quite fascinating as it traces the development of first high speed steel (turn of the 1900's), brazed carbide-style tools, and finally modern carbide. Even brazed carbide wasn't really widely adopted until the late 40's and early 50's, which is later than I would have guessed. Before that time, it was largely used for specialized tasks on tough materials. Productivity due just to improvements in cutting tools skyrocketed. The turn of the century development of HSS forced replacement of virtually all machine tools, and an operation that had taken 100 minutes now only took 26 minutes. Brazed carbide was another big increment, and true carbide inserts introduced in the mid-60's meant progress marched steadily forward. During the period from 1965 to 1980, productivity increased 240% due to cutting tools alone. To give some perspective, the turning operaton that took 100 minutes in 1900 could now be done in just 1 minute with the latest carbide tooling in 1980. Production in those days was largely done with copy mills and copy lathes, as CNC didn't start to take off until the late 70's. Interpolated Holes Not Round! Interpolated holes are a great test of a CNC milling machine because so many things have to work right for one to come out round and on dimension. The first reaction when an interpolated hole is not round is often that it is a machine problem. Backlash on one or more axes, improper number of steps per inch, and a host of other problems can be the cause. But there are other possibilities too. For example, suppose you're machining a ring-shaped part clamped in a vise. You interpolate the center hole and it isn't right. Maybe the vise is distorting your ring too much by applying pressure to top and bottom but not the sides. Another is the CAM program. From that same link comes a fellow who says he changed his Mastercam post to output circles as 4 quadrants instead of a complete circle (e.g. make 4 moves, each corresponding to a quadrant) which radically improved his accuracy to 0.0002". I've seen this 4 quadrant move in posts from other CAM programs, so there must be something to it. Can anyone tell me why? 4/4/10 Dave DeCaussin is Still At It Dave is the "D" in "Fadal", so he knows a thing or two about CNC. Lately he has been building tool changers and enclosures for Asian mills:
Don't they look great? Nice powder coated sheet metal will do wonders for the aesthetics and is very functional.
A little more about the tool changer...
And here is his little CNC slant lathe... Shopmade CNC Press Brake Press brakes are cool machines for bending sheet metal. The CNC variety have what is called a "back gage". You insert the sheet metal through the opening until the back of the workpiece hits the "back" gage and step on the pedal to do the bend. You can set up a variety of tooling in the opening, and a skilled operator can walk the workpiece through each station of tooling to make a finished part:
Meanwhile, there's a guy over on CNCZone who has done a post showing how he built a CNC press brake from scratch. Very cool project! Here are a couple videos and pix:
Demo of the back gage showing how it can move in 2 axes...
Bending some test parts...
Cylinder raw materials, and finished cylinders (this fellow does this kind of thing for a living, BTW)...
Machining the upper and lower die holders...
Plate was flame cut (2600lbs worth!). Ram is guided by some large two truck linear bearings...
He built a plasma table too and used it to cut the pieces for the hydraulic tank...
Back gage and hydraulic manifolding... 4/3/10 The Little Things Can Sure Slow You Down You know how it is when you're doing some job for the first time: the little things really slow you down. I'm trying to get the home switches working on my mill. I'm tired of having to edge find every time the mill faults or I hit the E-Stop, not to mention how the position mysterious seems to get lost in a whole host of other odd circumstances. You'd think it would be easy, but the little things really slowed me down. Here they are, just for your enjoyment: - Did a trial run, but chatter was terrible trying to hold a thin aluminum plate 11" long by 4" wide in a 6" vise. So, I took time out to make my Jaws of Doom so I could use two vises and support the workpiece along its entire length. That was a whole project with its own set of little things I won't go into. I am glad I did it though, those Jaws are bound to come in handy more than once. - Lost my hard disk. Man, that was no little thing! That created a major detour I ought not to charge against this project, but it still slowed me down. - Decided to get going on the project again and didn't want to wait for my data to be recovered (I got word all but 7 files I don't care about were recovered, BTW). So, I had to redraw the thing in Rhino and redo the CAM in OneCNC. Not too bad. Took me about an hour. Of course I also upload all that stuff to this web site so I can access it from the shop computer, and that's probably another 10 minutes of fooling around. - Back down in the shop and I am off and running. Of course I have to do that edge finding thing since I have no Home Switches! - Of course I also experienced a servo fault almost immediately for lack of enough way oil--forgot to run the one shot pumper. This reminds me I really need to put together a warmup program I can use while pumping to spread the way oil. I'm also almost through a gallon container and need to order some more from Enco. - Since I haven't gotten my manual/automatic tool change act together yet, each tool change is prefaced by measuring the Z-height. - While interpolating the first 5/8" hole with a 1/4" 3 flute, the cutter snapped. No idea why, it didn't seem to be doing anything all that crazy from a feeds and speeds standpoint. It's the last 3 flute so I switch to a 2 flute and slow the feedrate to about 1/2. No worries, but I do see what looks like a slight overrun on that hole from the 3 flute. Wonder why that happened? - Got through all the g-codes in pretty decent order in a couple of hours of fooling around. Took a Starbucks break in there at some point too. Guess that's a little thing. - OK, something weird is going on. One of those loss of position things because on my last chamfering operation, everything is shifted down about 20 thou. That is really annoying. Was I just not careful enough with the edge finder the last time I "re-homed"? Is there a bug in Smoothstepper? I recall this seems like it happened on my test piece, and also on my trial run on my miter gage. It's almost like the amount of coordinate shift is equivalent to how long the g-code program runs. That makes me suspect the Smoothstepper. Done for the night, we got friends coming for dinner. - First thing next morning I go look for Smoothstepper updates. Of course there are none, it is still beta and has been forever. Not the best supported device, I must say, and that's one reason why I don't trust it. May as well upgrade my alpha screen set too (I'm helping test the screenset for the next version of Mach3) since mine is pretty old. Installing that is another "little thing" delay I manage to spend and hour on. Lots of manual steps, some of which I never did succeed on. - While waiting for the download, I was cleaning the shop and stepped on the mill's air house. That made the quick disconnect pop. Been having troubles with that. Decided to take off the fancy new pushbutton quick release that isn't working quite right and put the old fashioned kind back on. - Next thing I want to deal with is the interpolated holes are a touch small. This is not a machine or program error, I just needed to specify more clearance than I did. I get the bright idea to use my tool offsets so I can have the same program make bigger holes. There goes another hour wasted--that stuff just doesn't really work in Mach3 and/or this screen set. - Along the way I did discover I had a diameter set that was contributing to making the hole too small. I set that to zero and it helped, but wasn't enough. Before I can rerun to see if it'll help, I run around with the edge finder and tool presetter and manage to fault. Hmmm, it's baulky when it's cold in the shop. Sure could use that warm up macro. Maybe I will just use MDI to rapid around each axis a few times, pumping some way oil until it quits faulting. Of course I mistype an MDI command that has the cutter rocketing towards the table. Hit the E-stop just in the nick of time. Of course this means I have to go back and rerun the edge finder and tool presetter. Ouch, more little things! - Correcting the tool diameter helped, but I want more. Unfortately, I discover you can't enter negative offsets (I wanted to tell it the tool is smaller than it is), and the whole thing is documented in uber-complex-ease for your convenience. Probably wasn't gonna work, but I thought the experiment might teach me something. Like I said, this stuff doesn't really work in Mach3. Arggghhhhh! - Back upstairs (hey, I'm getting my exercise as my office is 2 flights up from the garage shop). I am going to have to fix this idiot hole problem by faking out the diameter of the cutter in the CAM program. Not hard, it's just another 20 minutes gone. - Sitting here typing all this. Yeah, I didn't have to, but needed to whine a bit. 20 more minutes. Headed back down the stairs now to run my new program.... <And now I am back> ROFL, definitely not my day. Something is wrong with that new screen set, because running the program succeeded only in ramming the 1/4" endmill at full rapids straight down. Fortunately it landed on a Jaw of Doom rather than the vise or table. I E-stopped and then shut the whole works down. Need to consult with the screen set's author. It's heck being a guinea pig on new software sometimes! 4/2/10 Mill a Strip of Parts in a Vise So you want to make a bunch of small parts at once in one setup, and using one vise. Make a strip of parts in a set of big soft jaws:
The parts keep a strip underneath. To finish, flip the whole thing, drop it into softjaws of appropriate "negative image" of the parts, and mill of the back. An alternative would be to make a tooling plate that goes in the vise and acts as a pallet. Use Mitee-Bite clamps or the equivalent to hold the parts. Make at least two plates so you can load one while the machine is working on the other. If you start getting some chatter, the backing is probably too thin, or your jaws are holding it well enough. You call also try some big "Jaws of Doom" like I made up for 2 vises:
How Much Torque on a Kurt Vise? Found a good little tip over on CNCZone. One fellow says he put a torque wrench on his Kurt vise and discovered the fixed jaw starts to move if you torque it more than 45 ft lbs. Obviously you're also asking for trouble if you crank your vise down with a workpiece only sticking partially on one side of the jaws. Supposedely the Kurt 3600 has a pull, not a push screw, and is beefier in the right spots. This reduces flex 80%. One fellow mentions most programmers setting up the work zero at the top left of the workpiece up against the fixed jaw. An admin berates him for that, and a nasty spat ensues. I don't know about "most" programmers doing it, but it's certainly not the first time I've heard it and it is a pretty good idea for vise jobs. A little better idea I got from my friend Pete is to make work zero be the lower left corner of the fixed jaw of the vise. That vise probably stays put on the table quite a lot and you can drop a workpiece in, align to that point as though it is a stop, and get going fast. 4/1/10 CNC Cookbook is Gradually Coming Back to Life Some of you have been wondering where I've been lately that Ye Olde Cookbook Blog hasn't been updated. I lost my hard drive a couple weeks ago and that's no April Fool's joke. This is the second time. Seems to happen every couple of years. It's only been in the last 10 or 15 years that I go long enough between machine upgrades that this has become an issue. Always before there was enough new power available I would be upgrading every 2 or 3 years with an entirely new machine. Unfortunately, this time, like last time, there was a problem with my backup. Don't you hate when that happens? The last time, I was blissfully using an online service called Mozy that was later acquired by EMC. It turned out that while it looked like I had been backing up, Mozy could not manage to deliver the data to me no matter how hard they tried. Worse, this wasn't a situation unique to me. Boy was I unhappy! This time, I thought I was doing better. I had bought a 1 terabyte La Cie Big Internet Disk and the whole family was using it to backup. Even better, the La Cie was located in a detached garage, giving me the notion that it might survive if the house burned down. Unfortunately, the La Cie died for unknown reasons after a brief 18 month career and about 1 month before I really needed it. Sure sounds like Mr Murphy had a hand in that, eh? So, I am in the process of learning about "clean room data recovery." I sent the disk off to Iomega to see if they could recover the data. It ain't cheap, and it ain't fast are about all I've learned so far. They tell me the read/write heads on the disk went bad, but there doesn't appear to be any media damage, so they are hopeful they will recover most of the data. It's still too early to tell though, maybe next week. "So what's the good news?" you ask. Well, there is a little bit, actually. First, CNCCookbook, the web site, was backed up because of the copy on my ISP's web servers. Yay! I would hate to think of losing all this, it has taken years of effort to put it together. In addition, I have a backup of all the G-Wizard code I'd been working on, so nothing lost there, although I haven't had much chance to work on it in the meanwhile. Second, my new computer that I am editing this page on is a real screamer. After considerable hassle setting it up and getting all the old software re-installed (gee, I guess keeping the serial numbers in a file on that old hard disk wasn't as smart as I thought--DOH!), I finally have nearly everything back up and running. Let me just walk those of you that are Computer Geeks like me through some of the goodness. Solid State Disk: Speed Demons rejoice, for Solid State Disks rock! I got a little one, 60 GB, and that is now my C drive. The machine boots from it, and I use it to install the operating system and all software. I can boot my machine in about 20 seconds.Programs like Dreamweaver (what I use to edit this web site) pop up almost instantly. Boy is that sweet! It wasn't cheap--I bought the Mushkin SSD from Newegg for circa $250, but it sure was worth it. The rest of the data, largely what goes into "My Documents", resides on a brand new 300 GB Western Digital 10,000 rpm Raptor hard disk. It's no slouch either for speed. 4-Core, 3.7 GHz, 4 GB Motherboard: I'm using a honkin' fast Asus mobo that I really like. I've had several from Asus, and they rock. This thing cost $140, but the on-board video is way faster than the several year old Radeon dedicated card from the last machine and I don't feel a need to buy a stand-alone card. In addition, its automatic overclocking and core unlocking meant I could use a relatively cheap $100 AMD CPU as though it was a much more expensive CPU. The box only said it was good for 2 cores but I got 4 with this mobo. Plus, 4 GB of RAM. My last machine had 2 GB. You just can't have enough, especially if you run a lot of graphics. Windows 7: I was dreading the move off of Windows XP. I hate working on the wife's machine, which runs Vista. But Windows 7 has been a nice surprise. It's fast, pretty, and does some cool stuff I couldn't do as easily in Windows XP (or at least I never bothered to figure out how). For example, it was dead easy to move "My Documents" over to that alternate hard disk. Be sure to run the 64-bit version so it can access a lot more RAM than 32-bit. Now the bad news about the new rig. There's not too much, but there is some, and its all software related. I've got no games. I was only down to two fairly old games and they don't run on 64-bit Windows 7. DOH! The second is I'm hating Dreamweaver CS4 so far. I was a happy Dreamweaver 3 user. I'm sure a lot of it is just getting used to all that has changed, but why should I have to do that? Why isn't it all good? These guys at Adobe, in particular, are supposed to be real UI jocks, but some of it really has me shaking my head. Nobody will care unless you have to make the rather odd and abrupt jump across many versions and years that I did, but I'm not loving it. Enough with the whining. I'm hopefully caught up enough on this thing to return to quasi-regular posts and I am also hopeful of getting more time in the shop again. I am between jobs, which is actually a good thing for a little while precisely because it does let me get back into the shop and relax a bit.
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