Fuel Storage System

The PCNC 1100 from Tormach Allows Machinists to Command the Niche

John Harvey’s machinist skills operate in two narrow, but demanding, professional niches. His Los Angeles area business, Erospace Technologies Inc. (ETI) manufactures Fuelcel, a specialty fuel storage system for high-performance motorcycles. The Kevlar tank reduces a bike’s weight anywhere from seven to ten pounds, giving the rider greater acceleration. “About half of my customers are racers,” says Harvey. “The other half are high-performance street riding enthusiasts.” For a small but selective group of clientele, ETI builds short runs of the FuelCel tanks.

In much the same way, Harvey also creates custom fabrication or short-run pieces through his other company, MagiCine, offering various accessories to photographic and video equipment, including the Z-Box, a depth-of-field adapter to HDV/DV cameras, which allow directors to shoot in a 35 mm frame view.

Since 1989, Harvey cut his wares - whether for engines or cameras - on a manual mill. Recently, he looked into computer numeric controlled (CNC) mills. “I had a source in England where I was getting my fuel caps from, and it was getting expensive. I wanted to be able to private-label the caps and make some modifications. The only way to do that was to have them custom-made, which was also very expensive. So I began an extensive Internet search for small-envelope CNC machines. I came across the Tormach PCNC 1100. I read the design intent paper, and being a machinist and toolmaker myself, I appreciated where they were coming from and what they were doing with that design. That’s what sold me.”

The intention behind the PCNC 1100, according to the Tormach company founder and CEO Greg Jackson, was to develop the first “personal” CNC mill – a small, affordable mill that could run on household electrical power, be easily programmed to cut CAD models from a computer, and have the flexibility and power to cut almost any material in any fashion. It is available for under $7,000. “Like the first personal computers, the design achieved a size, price, power, and usability that made it a practical tool for the individual,” says Jackson. “Essentially, we wanted to develop the ideal mill for prototyping and short production runs.”

For Harvey’s requirements, the Tormach mill seemed like a more comfortable fit for his one-man, two-company operation. “The alternatives were really just 4-inch column drill-mill machines with CNC conversions on them - things like that. They weren’t really adequate. Anything else besides the Tormach had a much bigger footprint. I didn’t really want that large of a machine. If I didn’t go with the Tormach, I would have been stuck with a much larger machine, like a Haas, or a Bridgeport or any number of brand-name machines, which would be a lot more expensive. It would have been used; it would have been way too much horsepower, and tooling would have been very, very expensive. It would have been just a very big investment.”

Traditionally, CNC technology has been limited to the realm of the large machine shop, an industrial operation that would have the space for a 7-ton piece of equipment and the budget for a price tag of $20,000 - $200,000, plus the highly-trained personnel to operate it. Operators required not only machining experience, but also advanced g-code programming and debugging skills. By contrast, the new generation of personal mill weighs only a ton, and costs under $7,000 new. With new low-priced and easy-to-understand CAD and CAM software on the market, CNC programming is now well within the grasp of the solo machinist.

“The Tormach mill is easy to set up and operate as any CNC, perhaps simpler,” says Harvey of his self-education on the technology. “I’ve had no CNC experience personally. I’ve had some second-hand experience just by being around them a lot over the years, but I’d never actually been responsible for programming, debugging, and setting up tooling myself. The learning curve wasn’t too bad. It was steep maybe for a couple days, and after that, I was pretty much up and running.”

Harvey’s new lightweight CNC capabilities now allow him to produces all his fuel caps in house. “I’m doing a cap run now – 36 caps that need bevels cut – what would probably take me a couple weeks fulltime on a manual mill. I can do this now in about four days,” estimates Harvey. “The Tormach frees me up to do other work. I can hit ‘go’ on the machine and walk away, knowing that the program’s debugged. That way when I come back in an hour, I know I’ll have eight parts finished. That allows me to be productive in other places in the business.”

When you run two businesses, time is important. The tooling setup also helps in the more intricate fabrication of Magicine camera parts, allowing Harvey to customize aluminum billet components especially to his customer’s needs. “It enables me to make complicated parts quickly and accurately. I can make short production runs for accessories where there’s niche markets,” says Harvey. “Definitely, quick turn-around and low initial investment are some advantageous of the system.”

About Erospace Technologies, Inc.

Erospace Technologies, Inc. (ETI), of Westlake Village, California, manufactures FuelCel, an advanced lightweight composite motorcycle fuel storage system which greatly reduces the weight of high-performance vehicles. To view examples of this technology, please visit www.eti-fuelcel.com. ETI also offers a large array of specialty photography accessories at www.magicine.com, as well as custom fabrication services.