Blurring the Edges.

The author is a somewhat frustrated ‘weekend engineer’ with a small lathe and an old manual milling machine in his garage, whose day job doesn’t reflect his passion for making mechanical things. A chance discussion with a colleague culminated in him ordering a brand-new CNC (Computerised Numerical Control) mill from the USA. The machine is a Tormach® 770MX, a model aimed unashamedly at the high end of the hobbyist market, and certainly attracting the attention of small independent manufacturing ‘start-ups’, particularly in the United States.
This book records his journey of getting to grips with assembling all the components and learning how to operate the machine. It is purposely not an instruction manual – the manufacturer has already seen to that need. It is more a chronological log of all processes from choosing the right machine through to getting it to make parts. Taking the not insignificant leap from manual machining to CNC manufacturing, in the domestic environment, is a steep learning curve and this book is intended to assist, with many top tips gleaned from ‘learning the hard way’, shared throughout.
There are other excellent books out there, some mainly theoretical references, some siding with historical interest. The author envisaged a need for something more practical and hands-on. When he began his project, he couldn’t find a book like this.

Author Biography

Steve lives with his wife in a small village in Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom and has worked in the airline industry for over thirty years. His interests, when not at work, are for all things engineering. He acknowledges how lucky he was to have gone to high school in the seventies when they permitted ‘playing around’ with Colchester lathes in the lunch break, and he is passionate that modern-day schoolchildren should have access to real machines, not just the theory. He is an enthusiastic fan of Titan Gilroy in the United States, whose message is unequivocally that the Western world should be training its young people to manufacture the stuff we currently choose to purchase from the East. He hopes his book will encourage more people to ‘learn’ CNC, and bear witness to many more installations of machines, such as the Tormach CNC mills, particularly in educational establishments this side of the Atlantic.