Well if you got this far and haven’t contemplated throwing yourself under a moving vehicle you must be doing pretty well. Congratulations!, by now you should know enough to make a complete balls of trying to crash a CNC.
Tool selection , Turret position selector: This is one that can cause problems, in fact a simple screw up with this one cost my last employer £30,000 and 5 months of downtime to put right on a brand new machine. The rotary switch simply selects a tool number and pushing the white button will make the turret rotate to that tool. (for changing cutting tips etc) What it WILL NOT do is call up that selected tools offset, without that offset information the machine has no idea what the tool you just called up is. So, bright boy who was supposed to be watching over an apprentice lets his set up a tool but doesn’t CHECK what he’s doing. Said apprentice uses the turret indexing switch to call up tool 6 (a typical outside turning tool) he then proceeds to set up the tool and workshift (actual position of the lump of metal he wants to cut) using a tool that thinks it’s something else. Numpty boy does that then puts the machine into auto and hits start with the rapids at 100%. Said tool being 250mm longer than the actual tool he set the shift with now tries to go 250mm further than the tools actual length. A BIG bang later and the entire machine is in shit order with a tool block (bit that holds the tool) having been ripped off of the turret and spat out of the machine through the expensive window. The turret (that is aligned electronically is out, both radially and axially, pretty much anything bendable is now bent.
So remember, this will move the turret, NOTHING else to the selected tool number. Arrogance and stupidity gets people killed. Don’t be a clown.
Teach Program: ON/OFF: Not really used these days, in the early days of CNC’s you basically made the machines move by hand using the manual controls while this was selected and the NC would remember all the tools you have used and what you have done with them. A kind of easy (But long winded way) of creating programs back in the days of paper tape machines and floppy disks. If you cannot read fundamental G-Code you shouldn’t be near one of these things so go home and LEARN, it’s akin to taking a job as a Welsh translator if you only speak German. Another legacy thing that Fanuc never bothered getting rid of over the years, ok for robotics I guess but bugger all use for machining.
Edit Enable ON/OFF: Some companies treat their programs like gold bars and the same with machines, all this Key switch does is allows you to edit or input/output programs. It can be locked out to prevent over enthusiastic machine minders from changing stuff they shouldn’t be changing. Left to Lockout, Right to Write. Useful if you have a lot of minimum wage staff who are prone to playing with buttons they shouldn’t be playing with.
That’s about it for the main hard switch panel but as time permits I’ll add the soft key panel and screen items along with some demo programs for stuff we have made lately (allowing the intellectual property protections of course)
CNC’s are great, they let us do things that would take a manual machine days to do and some things manual machines simply cannot do. In general they are fast, very fast but temper that with the thought they can also be dangerous if treated with complacency. I always had a speech every new staffer got on day one minute one.
“These machines F***ing hate you, they do not care who you pray to, who you sleep with, what colour your skin is or where you came from. If you treat them with disrespect they will kill you”