CNC Machining Blog - Tips and Tricks for Machinists

Is Conversational Programming Dead in Today's Machine Shop?

During my 35+ years in manufacturing, I have worked at several shops and visited hundreds more. In the vast majority of these job shops, there has been at least one CNC machine with some type of conversational programming – and in many of these shops, they used conversational programming for most of their work.

The most frequent request we have received from customers over the past decade or so, has been for the ability to import a solid model directly into the CNC control and conversationally program features from that solid. Well...the wait is over. Hurco released the 3D Import feature at IMTS 2018 and it was a huge success. 

I am very excited about this feature, just like many of our Hurco WinMax users are. Although many people have this feature on their controls, they aren't aware of it, or don't know how to use it. I thought it was worth a quick blog post and video. 

There have been a number of enhancements on the Hurco WinMax control in the past few months and years that we never really get to share with our customers. The Hurco control is so easy to use and easy to self-teach that often times there are overlooked features that could be extremely useful and very powerful if operators knew about them. I thought this would be a great topic for a blog article to help our users find and understand these features if they weren’t previously aware of them.

CNC Cookbook Survey Respondents Rank Hurco Control #1

Well I’m just too excited about this not to share this news with my readers. With the help of Hurco Companies, I just recently published my very first actual book! It is a comprehensive guide to 5-axis CNC machining, and I wrote it to help the machinist as a shop floor guide of sorts.

A while back I received a comment on one of my previous blog posts – “5-Axis Programming: programming with tool vectors”-  asking about how to designate a 5-axis Transform Planes using IJK UVW vector tokens, instead of the traditional ABC rotary axis designations on their 5-axis CNC machine. Instead of just replying to that comment, I thought I would write this post as a response. Since this will be a continuation of the 5-axis CNC basics series, I suggest that you read and understand using IJK tool vectors as a pre-cursor to this article. 

The idea behind creating a 5-axis transform plane using vectors is exactly the same as programming tool movement with IJK tool vectors on any machine with a 5th axis; however, the difference lies in the fact that you will have two separate vectors…using IJK for one and UVW for the second one. The reason you need two separate “legs” for this function, is because you cannot designate a plane with only one axis. I will use the floor inside a room as my analogy…you could not create a floor in a room without having at least two walls. With only one, the floor would simply spin around that single axis, and could actually point in literally any direction. To accommodate the two legs of the transform plane, and because we want to determine the direction of the Z-axis ultimately, we will use the X-axis and Y-axis as our legs, or walls of the desired transform plane.