Who has bought a Tormach mill ?

[Alan Wood 4Participant @alanwood4]

Just spent the week at Saunders Machine Works doing Fusion training and CAM on the Tormach machines. Also attended the Open House on Saturday. Lovely experience. John Saunders is an even bigger personality in real life than he is on YouTube. An amazing guy and fabulous set up.

Seriously considering a Tormach and wonder what others experienced in shipping and using ?

(BTW – The 440 now has power tool bar and ATC available).

Alan

[Alan Wood 4Participant @alanwood4]

How did you get it to UK ?

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Bib Rodgerson of these parts has a Tormach.

Neil

[Curtis RutterParticipant @curtisrutter61973]

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

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Have a search, I think both Bob mentioned above and Andrew Johnston have both posted about shipping and the agents that they used, same agent if I remember rightly

[RobboParticipant @robbo]

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

[Anonymous]

I've been unable to find the import information in a previous post that I could cut 'n' paste. So here goes from scratch:

I used ACC (Shipping) limited in Gravesend. Basically they liased with Tormach and took care of all the shipping door to door as well as VAT and duty. It helps to have an agent as the load is LCL, ie, not a full container load, so it needs consolidating with other cargo. Otherwise you end up paying for the whole container!

The biggest killer is having to pay import VAT on the total price. There is also import duty, which worked out at about 2% of the total. In addition the shipping bill was £757. The single most expensive item for shipping was trucking from Liverpool to Cambridge. I shipped two crates, one for the mill and a smaller one for the 4th axis kit.

In theory to import you need an EORI (Economic Operator Registration and Identification) number. That's why one uses an import company. As is the way with the government I got allocated an EORI number in my own right anyway.

There are some caveats. I am VAT registered, so I could claim the VAT back. I imported my mill in 2009 so prices will no doubt have changed, as might the regulations. The offerings from Tormach have also changed considerably so there are many more toys to buy! I made my own stand and surround partly due to cost and available space. Also, at the time, the only stand that Tormach did had 115V 60Hz electrics which wasn't a whole lot of use.

I'll mull over whether to bore people with my experiences while I have a cup of tea. I could get used to these four day weekends, although I'll be working the next three days to make up for it.

Andrew

[SpurryParticipant @spurry]

Posted by Andrew Johnston on 09/05/2017 14:47:33:

……I'll mull over whether to bore people with my experiences while I have a cup of tea. I could get used to these four day weekends, although I'll be working the next three days to make up for it.

Andrew

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

Pete

[Alan Wood 4Participant @alanwood4]

Thank you Andrew, much appreciated. The VAT is an ouch issue but can't do much about that.

I think I am going for the 440 due to space restrictions. I used one last week and was impressed by the power it had so no issues there. The power drawbar is really nice but don't think I can run to the ATC at this stage. The bed movement is not as much as my manual Myford VMB but for clocks and locos I think it is adequate. The VMB will have to go and I think my BCA will join it as the 440 should cover their functionality.

Are you using Fusion ?

Alan

[Anonymous]

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

[MuzzerParticipant @muzzer]

The "freebie" version has all the features of the top end product – it's not cut down. And although I can't pretend I've come any where near using it, I believe the current update includes true "simultaneous" 4-axis operation, not just "wrapped" paths..

Fusion also includes full simulation, so you can check out the toolpath on the screen, with things like stock, workpiece, tool, toolholder etc modelled to check for (and show) collisions. You can turn them on and off in the display, make them transparent etc, depending on what you want to see. It's basically the professional HSMWorks CAM package integrated into the same environment for free. Being integrated, you can quickly and easily switch between the CAM and model (CAD) workspaces if you want to modify a feature without leaving Fusion or even closing the part.

Depends what your concern about cloud storage is. You can now work offline for up to 360 days on any files you opened before going offline. If you are bothered about confidentiality, your problem is much bigger than Fusion as it already includes your email, banking, shopping etc etc. Autodesk say they can't even access your work themselves, so nobody is snooping about in your work.

Murray

[Alan Wood 4Participant @alanwood4]

Hi Andrew

Very useful reply thank you.

I am retired but when in business decided that as a company we needed CNC milling. We had bought a small company that had a sheet metal shop and I landed them with a Bridgeport VMC and told them to get to grips with it. I had got the DO to start with Alibre which was quite reasonably priced in its early days. We used SprutCam and got a lot of support from the UK rep down in the West Country. The guys were soon producing some superb milled enclosures for our military products and we later added a Hardinge machine.

That was my only involvement at arms length with CAD and CAM but having retired I have set up a shop in the garage. I have tried a few packages but have found Fusion to be nice to use and there is so much support out there from John Saunders and Lars Christensen. The fact that as a hobbyist you get a fully spec'd package for free is quite a different strategy.

I have used Fusion for 3D printing and decided to go to NYC CNC for their training course on CAD and CAM. As a new user on the CAM side I struggled initially to get to grips but by the end of the week we had drawn and made items on the Tormach machines and I had used one of the 440s for this. The 3D Adaptive mode is so advanced on SprutCam as I remember it. We did some work on 4th axis and 3D milling but this took me into overload.

Based on this experience I think the 440 will do most of my work which is clock and live steam. The table movement is not a lot smaller than my Myford VMB and I have managed so far within these constraints. I would definitely struggle on workshop space with the 770.

Just seen Muzzer's contribution arrive and I would echo his comments. Kevin, last week's course presenter, is closely aligned with HSM.

Kind regards

Alan

[Alan Wood 4Participant @alanwood4]

Further comment on Muzzer's about cloud storage.

I logged on in the classroom in the US and had my desktop just as I left it in the UK.

I arrived back home and immediately had all the examples we worked on and the setups used for the CAM. I have these as references to work back against in my further adventures. No thumb stick transfers. No import routines.

Wonderful.

[Bob RodgersonParticipant @bobrodgerson97362]

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

[Anonymous]

I had one issue on the arrival of my mill. The spindle lock is a spring loaded bar that pivots out to lock the spindle when manually changing a tool. The spring was missing. A quick 'phone call and a replacement was on its way ASAP and FOC.

I have always found Tormach to be pretty responsive to queries and comments via email. Replies come by return, allowing for the time difference.

Now back to the (work) project from hell.

Andrew

[Nick HughesParticipant @nickhughes97026]

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

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