CNC Workshops, Wine, and Linux (But not at the same time)

The blog has been on break a little longer than usual. Don't worry, we're still here - and lots is happening! PCNC mills helping to make Wine better! First, a very cool customer showcase from Tim at VinPerfect. They make wine closures for regulating the flow of oxygen into a wine bottle, and also testing fixtures of product R&D - manifolds and such. Tim made this great video that shows how he makes both the test chambers and the brass wax stamp. With the wax stamp, he's using an 90K RPM Air spindle.

More from Tim: Below are manifolds used to test oxygen transmission through the cap liner we are developing. The liner is seated into the recess you see at the top and the lids (second pic) are put over them. Underneath is flushed with 100% oxygen and 100% nitrogen is flushed through the top. There are optical sensor dots that will be adhered to the inside of a glass window on the tops. That sensor can detect oxygen on the part-per-billion level - which shows us how much oxygen is transferring through the liner. For wine - it needs a little oxygen to age well, but too much and too little are both bad things. I could not find a machine shop that was willing to do this for me for a reasonable price - and the 4 units you see being assembled here are the 5th version of this design. The Tormach has paid for itself several times over by now. I also use the Tormach for dies. We use a air turbine spindle (just goes in the tts collet - not an accessory mount) to engrave wax stamping dies for the top of the cap.  Tormach at Digital Machinist Workshop As I mentioned earlier, we will again be participating at the Digital Machinist CNC Workshop. Specific Tormach events scheduled:

  1. Quick Intro to SprutCAM
  2. A sneak peak at the Tormach Injection Molder Project
  3. Tormach Tooling System ATC Design Discussion
  4. How to make your own TTS Flycutter
  5. 4 Axis SprutCAM demo

We will also have special pricing on the show demo units for anybody who can haul them away. You'll get a discount on slightly used machinery and save on shipping as well. Email us here for more details. Tormach with EMC2 We now have another version of the Tormach Machine Controller available for sale on the website, preconfigured with EMC2 instead of Mach3. EMC2 is an open source Linux-based machine control program that was originally created by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) and is now mangaed and maintained by the developer community at www.linuxcnc.org. We have a PCNC 1100 in the lab that runs EMC2, and it's an alternative choice for PC based motion control. Although not as large as the Mach community, there are still a lot of EMC2 users, and also a lot to like about the project. The preferred controller for Tormach PCNC mills is Mach3. The Mach3 configuration supports all Tormach accessories - like CNC Scanner, ATC, Duality Lathe, Touch Probe, etc. None of these software interfaces are available for EMC2. Why might somebody consider EMC2?

  • You want access to the control program Source Code
  • You want to use Linux instead of Windows (MachOS is a custom compile of the Windows XP Embedded System co-created by Tormach and ArtSoft)
  • You cannot find a workaround for a current bug or limitation in Mach3

Want to know more? Read our Technical discussion here. We also now have Controller restore DVDs available as well. These will restore your Tomach Machine Controller, whether Mach3 or EMC2, back to its factory configuration. These are a great troubleshooting tool, especially if you suspect that any files have been corrupted that are critical to proper controller operation.  You can read more about those here.