Steve (Correze)
Established Member
(CNC has it's own problems)
Hi, introduction first, I guess.
I suppose I'm a professional cabinet maker, though that's a title I'd hesitate to use as I've always thought of a cabinet maker as a craftsman with about 50 years of experience and a bunch of apprentices, perhaps I'm an apprentice?
Anyway, I work in France in a large factory producing furniture, mostly for hotels, but also kitchens, desks, a bit of everything really. We work mainly with chipboard and MDF, rare to actually see any "real" wood.
I'm a CNC machinist/programmer. My usual "toy" is a Homag BAZ router/edgebander, similar to the one here, but an older design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HteA3UVaDlk
We have 3 of these, plus another 4 routing/drilling machines (it's a big factory), so I'm generally kept fairly busy during the day running my machine (custom/one-off pieces) and keeping the others going (production runs).
CNC isn't always the magic it's presented as and brings it's own, unique, problems, as in the title of this thread.
You design the piece, write the program and everything is fine... you load it onto the machine and it starts correctly, then half way through, the machine comes to a halt with an error, "I can't do that."
This is normally followed by about an hour of swearing, shouting, kicking things across the floor and growling at temporary staff
With the older machines such as mine, it's rarely an unsolvable problem, you just need to take a slightly different approach to the operation in question or fiddle a setting (e.g. giving an 18mm diameter tool a radius of 8.99) and off you go.
Friday however, I was attempting to solve an apparently simple problem on one of the newer (literally brand new) machines... the newer software is starting to second-guess the operators intentions and won't let you pull a lot of the tricks that worked with the older machines. Trying to cut a 50mm long notch 6mm deep in the edge of a board to accept a plinth, the small tools (6mm diameter) were wearing out too quickly to give an acceptable result (chipping the melamine). Rewriting the program to use a larger tool to rough out the cut and then finish with the smaller tool gave "I can't do that, the radius of the corner will be too large" (it won't, as you're passing with the smaller tool afterwards). Solution reached in the end? Let someone else deal with it on Monday!
I can machine the same piece on my machine (10 years old) with no problems.
As for more conventional woodworking, I'm about to start building a house, first I need to build and kit out the workshop, then the house can follow.
No CNC in my home workshop, that's for certain.
Hi, introduction first, I guess.
I suppose I'm a professional cabinet maker, though that's a title I'd hesitate to use as I've always thought of a cabinet maker as a craftsman with about 50 years of experience and a bunch of apprentices, perhaps I'm an apprentice?
Anyway, I work in France in a large factory producing furniture, mostly for hotels, but also kitchens, desks, a bit of everything really. We work mainly with chipboard and MDF, rare to actually see any "real" wood.
I'm a CNC machinist/programmer. My usual "toy" is a Homag BAZ router/edgebander, similar to the one here, but an older design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HteA3UVaDlk
We have 3 of these, plus another 4 routing/drilling machines (it's a big factory), so I'm generally kept fairly busy during the day running my machine (custom/one-off pieces) and keeping the others going (production runs).
CNC isn't always the magic it's presented as and brings it's own, unique, problems, as in the title of this thread.
You design the piece, write the program and everything is fine... you load it onto the machine and it starts correctly, then half way through, the machine comes to a halt with an error, "I can't do that."
This is normally followed by about an hour of swearing, shouting, kicking things across the floor and growling at temporary staff
With the older machines such as mine, it's rarely an unsolvable problem, you just need to take a slightly different approach to the operation in question or fiddle a setting (e.g. giving an 18mm diameter tool a radius of 8.99) and off you go.
Friday however, I was attempting to solve an apparently simple problem on one of the newer (literally brand new) machines... the newer software is starting to second-guess the operators intentions and won't let you pull a lot of the tricks that worked with the older machines. Trying to cut a 50mm long notch 6mm deep in the edge of a board to accept a plinth, the small tools (6mm diameter) were wearing out too quickly to give an acceptable result (chipping the melamine). Rewriting the program to use a larger tool to rough out the cut and then finish with the smaller tool gave "I can't do that, the radius of the corner will be too large" (it won't, as you're passing with the smaller tool afterwards). Solution reached in the end? Let someone else deal with it on Monday!
I can machine the same piece on my machine (10 years old) with no problems.
As for more conventional woodworking, I'm about to start building a house, first I need to build and kit out the workshop, then the house can follow.
No CNC in my home workshop, that's for certain.
