Official Luthiers Forum!

Hey Andy I'm just wondering if you've had a chance to compare your three different control systems and have any time to share any comments you might have.

You're certainly in a very interesting and valuable situation for comparative knowledge of those systems.

I've been reading through this thread and there's a fair bit of mention of smooth steppers and one person mentioning being limited to XP etc.

I'm running Mach 3, WIN7, a Ethernet Smoothstepper. Machine has an ATC and all sorts of goodies like variable speed controllers and USB remote control.

It was a fair journey getting it all running, I'll admit if I didn't have the engineer who designed and built the machine onsite and helping I wouldn't have a running machine, but it seems all the bugs have been ironed out and it's setup and a success, so it is possible.

It's been a while so my memory is not too fresh, we went through a few different versions of Mach to get the right one (can't remember what version but it wasn't the latest). Started off with a USB Smoothstepper which got replaced with the Ethernet version, that solved a lot of the glitching. Getting the Smoothstepper powered in a manner it didn't cause issues solved computer Mach3 crashes. Then not having my CAD/CAM and Mach3 open at the same time solved PC crash/freeze issues, even though the PC is a powerful machine and more than adequate, it didn't like the two softwares open while Mach was running. The engineer wrote custom codes for Mach3 for the tool changer and at the moment I'm not having Mach3 issues.

Writing a post processor was a task I'm glad I got over and required a fair bit of trial and error. I used the post processor editor for Mach3 and watched the tutorials on YouTube, but it was still a case of figure it out for yourself and test it till you get it right.

Now the biggest issue I can whine about would be the cheap POS tool changer, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone. The first one leaked water (wasn't sealed) and it would not release tools holders. They did replace it but the second one is not right either. I spent a small fortune on upgrades to the machine to allow for the ATC and it still won't release tools all the time (maybe 50% of changes will work), I have to stand there at each tool change and pop the tool holder with a screw driver, which means I can't leave the machine un attended.

Overall though the bulk of our issues were with the Smoothstepper and ATC. Mach3 has been fine. The Smoothstepper is sorted and the ATC will never be right and from what I've been told the company that sold it to us has stopped replying to emails long ago.

Which ATC spindle did you go with?

I'm curious about the Chinese ones on Ebay

Work, life and laziness have conspired against me to keep me from getting KmotionCNC up and running but I have fully migrated from Mach 3 to UCCNC. Here's the cliffs notes summary:

UCCNC's trajectory planner is far superior to Mach 3's

UCCNC v 1.0x that I've used has bugs and missing features (e.g. G17 is supported but G18 and 19 aren't) hat have caused me troubles that cost me money. I've not yet tested the new version which might have some fixes in it.

All around, I'm more of a fan of UCCNC than Mach 3

I'm not such a fan of UCCNC that I'm not going to try KmontionCNC

So far, neither Mach 3 nor UCCNC v1.0 are acceptable for my* production environment

My long term plans if KmotionCNC pans out (I've read that it's rock solid) are to migrate all machines to that and to either add encoders to my stepper system or switch to servos for reliability.

* Lot's of folks are using Mach 3 in production and seem happy with it. Doesn't work for me doesn't necessarily mean it won't work for you.

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

The ATC came from Blurry Customs. It was their biggest model. The ATC itself was about eight grand once freight and taxes were added. Because of the weight etc the engineer deemed the machine had to be upgraded to a rack and pinion, which meant having two lots of drivers and so forth. The entire ATC upgrade cost me $18k (blurries price plus CNC upgrade price)

It took them about a year to deliver, which when they say they have this stuff in stock is pretty piss poor. The long wait created a lot of issues at this end and I lost out financially due to the wait as I was expecting a finished CNC in 3 months. That was the contractural delivery time by the guy building it.

So I put off taking customer orders as I was trying to have a clean slate when the cnc arrived so I could have time to learn an integrate it. I had enough builds that by the time I finished them the cnc should have been sitting there.

Blurry kept saying "yes, we're sending it", but never did. As we kept getting strung along I kept my slate clean which meant I had no come coming in, which meant that when the pinch got real bad and I was living on credit card I had to take on extra shifts at a factory while blurrys "we're sending it" was dragged out to a year. Being that I re mortgaged the house to have this machine (just under fifty grand once you include air comp, tools holders, cutting bits, computer etc etc) so things got pretty stressful. I also had a guy working for me four days a week that I had to put off. Even now nearly two years later I can't afford to re hire anyone. The engineer is a one man business as well and he had to leave allowances so all this screwed him over as well.

Anyway, blurry FINALLY delivered. The spindle they sent me is the one in their carousel demo. It ran, but they never tested it with water (it's a water cooked spindle) and it leaked. Water poured out of where the tool holder sits! Their story is they only run them air cooled, but I'm in Australia, stuff gets hot, it needs water cooling. The tool changer wouldn't release the tool, it was jammed in there as if it was welded.

They did replace the spindle, the engineer loaned me a spindle temp so I could learn to run the machine without ATC at this point. Blurry rushed another ATC spindle to us. This time it didn't have their logo etc milled into it. Looked like it was fresh from China.

Anyway, new spindle worked. That was AFTER the engineer re wired it as it was wired backwards. The blurry tool change script the engineer said was rubbish and he re wrote from scratch. This got the tool changer working. Problem is the tool holder buttons didn't suit the tool changer (they were jamming), so back to blurry and apparently they were aware of the problem and send out new buttons that they milled up. These were just as bad so the engineer milled his own to try get it working. This is now fifteen months since I was meant to have a CNC.

Long story short, when it's cold, the tool changer works great. Once it's been used a little bit and heats up, it doesn't work at all. After discussions with Blurry the engineer told me they are well aware of all these issues but the dodgy pricks continue to sell them anyway.

He had more questions for them but they stopped answering his emails and decided to ignore him. I was meant to have a dozen tool holders, I have only six. I've spent massive dollars on a tool changer that doesn't work. It changes, but I have to lever the tools out manually during the change process.

My experience with blurry was pretty bad, cost me a whole lot of income and a butt load of stress. Even now a couple years later I'm hurting from it and because of all the downtime in production, my business has lost the momentum I spent years building up and is now running at about a half of what it was before I decided I needed to invest in CNC. I need to be making minimum fifty guitars a year to survive and in probably on 25 at the moment, so I'm really hoping momentum grows again.

So much for taking risks!

Allan, that is a hard story. I understand needing to sell 50+ guitars just to make a living. I don't know how anyone gets the market, but having the market for 50 guitars and being limited by technical glitches to producing only 25 is a sure fire recipe for all kinds of stress related ailments! I hope you have a lot of yoga/meditation/whiskey/whatever you need to stay healthy and relaxed.

I've found whiskey helps! I've also been taking on a lot of repair work lately which is something I've avoided in the past.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience, Allan, it's just downright terrible.

Blurry has been around for years, always promising magical things, but I've always suspected they were vapour- they used to claim they made three or four different CNC machines, but never had anything but renderings of a couple of them, and their old videos of their ATC and their machines never showed them cutting at anywhere near the performance specs they had on their site. They put more work into ensuring they have a pretty website and the photos of their workshop always look super clean! I'm really sad to hear someone from this forum had to suffer to confirm that suspicion.

Even years in, it seems like the CNC market is still very much buyer beware until you're dealing with 'the major brands'. It's a sad state of affairs.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services