Steel Flanges Drilled & Tapped 

I'm trying to think of the name for the paper punched controlled machines, they are the pre cnc. The first two letters are NC but I can't think of the third letter. Stands for numeric control. I think CNC stands for computer numeric control. It's been 30 years

I set up and ran old Cincinnati Cintematic NC mills for a few years when I first started in the trade in '79. It used punch tape, operator changed the tools. Tool height and feed depths were controlled by preset cam operated hydraulic stops on a big drum. Sometimes we used really long tapes or had to switch a couple of tapes for one piece. We had lots of long running parts. We also inspected each other's set ups and new parts to prove them out. Later we got incredible big and powerful 3 axis Matsuuras. My favorite CNCs of all time. These ran on tape or software. If one guy could both set up and keep 3 machines running 75% of the time we'd be paid double time or a bit less for lower run times. On night shift we'd often play ping pong most of the night, work up a good sweat and keep all those machines going. Just 2-4 of us running 1/2 the entire machine shop. We also got shift differential pay so the lazy day shift could blame their f-ups on us! 😂 We rarely needed to deal with our bosses, who were only bosses because they couldn't hack this easy work. Mere politicians. We had the ping pong table set up on a 4'x 8' granite surface plate in the middle of the shop. We couldn't cheat and move the table! We even snuck beer past the security guards. That was a sweet job until the Cold War ended.

are you following new technology like metal 3D printing?

@@rodiona8781 Nah, I'm retired and 'devolving'! 🤣 Even though I'll probably never fully retire and stop doing what I do. I just work for myself now and it's mostly for fun, to keep 'out of trouble'! DIY was passed down in my family for generations. I enjoy getting my hand dirty even if it doesn't pay much helping out a friend. I'd rather hang out in my man cave instead of relaxing in front of TV. I own a US made Bridgeport mill, an old US made Hardinge lathe, various US made grinding equipment and some welding and brazing equipment. I like good 'old junk' best. I may soon add a CNC control to my mill after I move to the Rockies. My engineer buddy has a self made EDM sinker machine we built to make gun parts. It's really cool. We burned a 1/2" hole thru a hardened 1" thick tool bit in about 20 minutes, just for fun. I have access to that too. I've used it to easily burn big broken bolts out of 4wd parts. I'm a old school hands on DIY type guy and enjoy the manual fabrication processes. I do lots of stuff like the videos here, but generally not quite as large. I'm still building lots of 4wd stuff and high end bicycles for myself, friends and clients. I love to prototype race car and sand rail parts for some of my buddies. I still do contract small batch work and prototype work if the money is right and IF it's something challenging. All my career, I've only done work I've enjoyed and looked forward too. If my jobs got boring or I was unhappy, I quickly moved on. Life is too short not to enjoy one's work. We spend so much time working, we'd best enjoy it. Anyways, I've never had trouble finding work. Good fabrication skills are highly in demand now. Before I retired, I machined aerospace hardware and tiny surgical devices using lots of the more modern 3-6 axis machinery. Aircraft maintenance machining and surgical devices were the most challenging work I ever had. The stuff we developed for a heart surgeon we often needed to manually machine looking at parts thru a microscope. I went from machining giant airliner parts to tiny complex pieces made out of titanium. It was sort of a trip, but all the machining principles remain basically the same. Seeing it and inspecting it is the real challenge.

@@garymurt9112 Actually i have no idea. I just own an old Pratt and Whitney triax tape o matic i was told was using punched cards for programming. I know it used to have a giant reel to reel tape machine to save the programs on. Since I’ve owned it, it’s been retrofit with a centroid control.

I just stick in 200mm if i have clamps on the table. No point in puckering it.

@@spikeypineapple552 Oh nice I'm usually hovering at 150mm and yeah youre 100% right - no need to stand there and risk anything. A colleague of mine thinks its wasting time but he has a hard time convincing anyone with the amount of broken drills, clamps and parts that goes in his chip container ^^

He is proving An old saying wrong can't teach an old dog new tricks lol

Cool man. Nice info!, glad to hear a reasonable you.

Yeah no reason to cut it so close

Yes Yes Yes

Everyone chamfers before tapping. It is so obvious that I don't even think it is taught. How has this passed him by for so long. Just swap over the last 2 tools. Better still, use a large spot drill at the start to cut all the chamfers before drilling & lose the last chamfering op. These are not CNC tips, it's established machine shop practice.

I can make that even more generic: any computer code does exactly what you told it to, not what you want. What's why we software developers always have to deal with bugs in the code -- no matter how hard you try, there's always cases where code and intention don't match up, and so so many of them happen in pieces of code you didn't think could be wrong!

Glad to see you thought to make those changes!! I made my comment before the end of the video.

Very well said!

If this looks like magic search for speedio drill and tap then your mind will be blown

Right on. We got that changed for the later runs so it wasn't an issue.

@@MechanicalAdvantage Oh ffs. That’s what I get for commenting before the end of the video. Love your fusion 360 tutorials by the way. They’re super well done.

@@kevind1865 Thank you. Once we got that height changed when he told me about the issue, then he could let things run at full song without worrying about hitting the clamps.

When we programmed this part, he had an idea of how he was going to set these parts up, but nothing was concrete. Spending the time to place the 123 blocks and clamps etc. in this setup is overkill when you could just get it setup and then measure how high the tallest clamp is and not worry about the clamps at all. Especially when he has a reference part that we can use to make sure he doesn't put a clamp where a toolpath needs to go.

If you watch farther, this is exactly what he does in the second iteration of the program!

Next lesson is Thread Milling 😮

CNC has been around for a long time though, it's not some super new thing.. They've been around since the 90s, it's more than industry standard now. Machining has been shedding a lot of young people (in my area at least) due to poor wages, poor environments, and insane work load... You have to fight tooth and claw after many years to get paid what a software engineer gets paid starting out, if you want an idea of how terrible wages are (generally), some places are better than others and do pay fairly but they're a rarity... Then you also have to deal with routine lay offs because it's feast or famine in this industry. Don't get me wrong it can give you an OK to mostly comfortable living depending where you live, but it's definitely not attracting boat loads of young guys. We're competing with developing countries that are running CNCs and paying guys a couple dollars a day. A machine is a machine, the product is more or less the same. It's automation.

Yep. Those flanges are a perfect example of a slow and tedious part to run on a manual mill, but fast and effortless on a CNC. An order for 30 more would take only a little longer than the 5 or 6 he machined.