Quote:
Originally Posted by qnetjoe
Onto the machine. I generally recommend the Haas toolroom lathes. They can be ran in a near manual mode which is good for teaching basic lathe work and then you can slowly introduce CNC concepts. One cool thing about Haas is that the control is almost the exact same between the mill and lathe making learning both alot easier and allow you to focus more on teaching machine and not teaching the CNC control system.
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I love the Haas control panel, but the quality of their lathes is not great. They have serious issues holding a constant diameter when turning, small adjustments in offset (.0001") often leads to much bigger changes in actual part size, and faces quite frequently don't end up flat. I was making some parts that had to be 2.48" +/- .0004", and if you bumped the offset up by .0001", you could expect to see the diameter increase by at least .0004". It was an absolute nightmare to hold those tolerances. Keeping another part flat and parallel to within .005" was incredibly difficult as well. It took a lot of taper adjustments on the facing operation to really dial it in to cut the face flat.
For FRC purposes, these tolerances probably won't matter, but anyone buying one of these machines should be aware of its tolerance issues. They're cheap, and I guess they're decent machines, but you definitely aren't going to see the same level of quality as you will in their vertical mills (which can also be a little lacking sometimes).