Milling Around

One of the first posts on the blog this sum­mer was a sneak peak of our Power Draw Bar pro­to­type for use with the PCNC. If you’ve been to a work­shop here, you’ve prob­a­bly played around with the first pro­toype as well — the power draw bar machine is everybody’s favorite machine to use, no ques­tion about it.

We are now start­ing the early adoption/beta test­ing period and are look­ing for sev­eral PCNC own­ers who would like to par­tic­i­pate. Please email us at info@tormach.com if you are inter­ested. We will begin con­tact­ing peo­ple with infor­ma­tion about the pro­gram, pric­ing, etc. around the mid­dle of next week. We have lim­ited amount of slots avail­able, but will accom­mo­date as many as we can.

PS.
Min­i­mum Require­ment for Beta Sites: Air Com­pres­sor that can hold pres­sure at 120psi. Must be TTS user. Ide­ally, we’d like to find a few peo­ple who use the machine on a daily basis. *UPDATE 11/15/2009* 120 psi is just for the beta ver­sions. We’ve already made a design change for the pro­duc­tion ver­sion so you can use with a more typ­i­cal house­hold compressor.

Co– win­ners, actually…

John S. from NYCNC (great blog, btw) and Willy. We’re going to put together a short video on 2.5D work­hold­ing. Stay tuned!

John and Willy will both recieve a one year sub­scrip­tion to Dig­i­tal Machin­ist, cour­tesy of Vil­lage Press. I’ll be in touch with you both early next week.

The con­test remains open, so keep your sug­ges­tions com­ing. Here’s what its about.

I’d like to share some images I’ve received from the TOPS Beta Testers (Thanks guys!). Not sure what TOPS is? Then read this.

The first image is a cross sec­tion of a Tubine Blade in a jet engine. The 2 – 4 images are parts from a KTM dirt bike. Enjoy! I’ll post more as I get them.

Some­thing new for the Dual­ity… the Dual­ity Lathe 4th Axis. This lets you do both lathe and 4th axis work on a sin­gle setup — per­fect for key­ways, engrav­ing, etc. on small turned pieces. Here’s Matt tak­ing about the design.

And a fun demo video mak­ing chess pieces

If your won­der­ing about Zero Back­lash Har­monic Dri­ves, this is how they work. This is a very cool tech­nol­ogy that lets you achieve much greater gear reduc­tions in a com­pact space than more con­ven­tional plan­e­tary sys­tems. In addi­tion, the unique tooth engage­ment between the gears means Zero Back­lash in the drive.

Here’s an ani­ma­tion of how the drive works:

Zero Back­lash Har­monic Dri­ve Animation

and a model of a typ­i­cal har­monic drive:

Typ­i­cal Har­monic Drive

Nothing’s for free, right? Well, this is pretty close…We’re giv­ing away Free Sub­scrip­tions to Dig­i­tal Machin­ist!

Here’s the small catch… We want some ideas for videos you’d like to see about CNC.  Edu­ca­tion is a big part of our mis­sion at Tor­mach, and we’re going to release some new video tuto­ri­als — we even got some new A/V club toys to play around with, so this should be fun.  But we want to know what you’d like to see. So reply back to this post with your ideas, and keep them coming. 

If we select your idea for a video topic, you’ll be rewarded with a free 1 year sub­scrip­tion to Dig­i­tal Machin­ist, cour­tesy of Vil­lage Press. I’ve got a few of these sub­scrip­tions to hand out, and we will keep this offer open until we run out.

If you haven’t seen Dig­i­tal Machin­ist, stop by the new­stand and pick up a copy. There’s always neat projects and great ideas. I’m even think­ing about tack­ling build­ing the Orrery fea­tured on the cover. I think that would look fan­tas­tic on the desk.

Thanks again to George and the rest of the team at Vil­lage Press for your support

BTW, George has just announced the relaunch­ing of the Dig­i­tal Machin­ist CNC Work­shop for 2010. It will be held a Washt­e­naw Com­mu­nity Col­lege in Ann Arbor, Michi­gan from June 22 – 25, 2010. I’ve never been before, but am very much look­ing for­ward to the trip as I’ve heard great things about pre­vi­ous work­shops from many of our friends and customers.