I'm in the process (hopefully!) have just requested a quote for the pcnc 770 shipped

Bob Rodgerson also described his experiences with the Tormach, including purchase and shipping, in MEW nos 240 & 241.

Yes please, Andrew. I'm sure we would all enjoy. Delighted that you are taking the new job seriously.

Pete

I bought my Tormach PCNC1100 in 2009, I have a Series II machine. I bought the basic machine, 4th axis kit, some side screw holders, ER collet holders and the lifting kit. I made my own stand and surround complete with coolant tank and pump. I also bought some drill chuck tapered shanks, but bought a range of drill chucks in the UK.

Intially I used a secondhand computer to run Mach3, but after some issues I bought a proper Tormach controller. After that had some wobblies a year or two back I bought a new controller capable of running PathPilot properly.

Other additions have been a power drawbar, not yet fitted, and an electronic tool height setter.

I've written elsewhere about the Tormach versus Bridgeport:

**LINK**

I've just had a quick look at the 440 on the Tornach website. Looks very neat but a couple of points spring to mind. First the travels are quite small, and on any milling machine it can take some considerable fiddling to be able to use almost all of the travel. I'd knock at least a couple of inches off the theoretical travels. Second the machine listed as requiring 115VAC, presumably 60Hz?

Most of the issues I have had with the basic machine have been to do with the electronics. I had a problem with a dry joint and with a poor quality copy of an industrial connector, both of which led to intermittent spindle problems. The dry joint was solved by re-soldering and the connector issue by buying the proper industrial connectors from a UK distributor. I've also had a limit switch fail – probably due to coolant ingress fudging the internals. Again a replacement from a UK distributor solved the issue. Overall I haven't had that many issues, and for balance I've had quite a few issues with the electrics on my manual machines, mostly due to contactor problems.

There are many "experts" who opine that CNC is easy; all you need to do is press a button and a part magically appears. Personally I disagree. I find that CNC makes me think much harder about speeds and feeds, including widths and depths of cut. One important area that gets forgotten is fixtures. It can require a lot of thought, and preplanning, to come up with fixtures that allows a part to be held rigidly while allowing free access to the cutter. As an example I recently machined a small heatsink that had two bosses on diametrically opposite corners. When I machined the bosses, I left some metal at the opposite end of each side. That meant that the part still had features on each side that were parallel. That made the part easy to hold in the machine vice for machining the internal features. The last operation, on the manual mill as it happens, was to machine away the surplus metal.

Another issue with CNC is the generation of G-code, and this is something that put me off buying CNC for some considerable time. Of course G-code can be written by hand. But that severely limits what you can make. It's going to be pretty hard to hand write G-code to machine a bevel gear or a spline cutter. There are a number of free, or cheap, CAM programs available, but they fell far short of the features I wanted. At the other end of the market are high end commercial packages which do not advertise prices. If you have to ask you can't afford it!

I was already using Alibre (Geomagic) for 3D CAD and while they had CAM available (an early version of Visualmill) it didn't meet my requirements. After a lot of thought I selected and bought OneCNC. I didn't get on with it, panic'd and sent it back for a refund. Instead I bought VisualMill. That may well have been a mistake as VisualMill has some serious issues. For instance there is a function for making a hole using helical toolpaths. It plain doesn't work, and generates nonsense G-code. In the end I created the hole by pocketing with a series of helical ramps. That brings me to another point not often mentioned. I sanity check the G-code with a program called NCPlot. This generates a toolpath from the G-code itself. It is by no means unusual for the G-code not to agree with the toolpath the CAM program thinks it is generating. NCPlot is also a useful check on X, Y and Z limits in the code to make sure that an unseen command isn't going to start milling away the table for instance.

I have considered OneCNC again, but they have an odd business model where you can't trial a demo version. Instead you have to buy, several thousand pounds, and then get a refund if you're not happy. No thanks!

I'm not using Fusion at the moment. I tried it a while ago, got frustrated, and then got bogged down in work. However, one of the items on the list for the long weekends is to get back into Fusion and try it out again. At some point I am going to have to make a decision about annual maintenance for my 3D CAD, and whether VisualMill is worth upgrading. If Fusion can take over, all well and good. Two things concern me at the moment. One I'm not happy with cloud storage, and second I don't think you get 4th axis CAM in the freebie version.

Hmmm, that turned out to be more waffle than I was intending.

Andrew

Alan,

I used the same company as Andrew to import my mill. accworlwide.com , will find them. They have recently handled the import of a PCNC 1100 for Jeff Whitaker who contacted me and whom I supplied the information required.

He has received his PCNC but has had a few issues with parts of his order not being there and one or two minor technical issues. Most of the problems seem to be down to Tormach changing the warehouse/shipping system, I believe to a new location and the technical issue was down to poor QC of tooling.

In fairness to Tormach, these issues have been dealt with but I am sure they aren't pleased with their performance with this particular order. Hopefully they will have sorted out the QC issues by the time you get your order in.

Bob

Hi Andrew,

I have Geomagic with VisualCAM for Geomagic (same as VisualMill, but intigrated in Geomagic), both are 2014 and the helical hole function works ok for me,

Nick.

Edited By Nick Hughes on 11/05/2017 11:29:39