Before CNC
January 28th 2008 06:06 pm By Web Development in India
While there are exceptions to this statement, CNC machines typically replace (or work in conjunction with) some existing manufacturing process/es. Take one of the simplest manufacturing processes, drilling holes, for example.
A drill press can of course be used to machine holes. (It’s likely that almost everyone has seen some form of drill press, even if you don’t work in manufacturing.) A person can place a drill in the drill chuck that is secured in the spindle of the drill press. They can then (manually) select the desired speed for rotation (commonly by switching belt pulleys), and activate the spindle. Then they manually pull on the quill lever to drive the drill into the workpiece being machined.
As you can easily see, there is a lot of manual intervention required to use a drill press to drill holes. A person is required to do something almost every step along the way! While this manual intervention may be acceptable for manufacturing companies if but a small number of holes or workpieces must be machined, as quantities grow, so does the likelihood for fatigue due to the tediousness of the operation. And do note that we’ve used one of the simplest machining operations (drilling) for our example. There are more complicated machining operations that would require a much higher skill level (and increase the potential for mistakes resulting in scrap workpieces) of the person running the conventional machine tool. (We commonly refer to the style of machine that CNC is replacing as the conventional machine.)
Machining center
By comparison, the CNC equivalent for a drill press (possibly a CNC machining center or CNC drilling & tapping center) can be programmed to perform this operation in a much more automatic fashion. Everything that the drill press operator was doing manually will now be done by the CNC machine, including: placing the drill in the spindle, activating the spindle, positioning the workpiece under the drill, machining the hole, and turning off the spindle.
http://www.cncci.com/resources/articles/what%20is%20cnc.htm
