Until recently live tooled tenon/mortise threading was not in the picture for me. Now that CH has developed one for the Deluxe Cuesmith and I have also acquired CNC capabilities to cut threaded mortises and tenons implementing this feature is my next big project.
In the short term I think that Chris's solution is the 'quick and dirty' way to go. You just have to know what threads you want to cut, buy the appropriate gears and do it. According to Chris's website additional gears can be added at any time. He supplies what appears to be the most common ones and I doubt I would ever really need to venture far from what he supplies. The downside I see is that there has to be a setup burden that would make transitioning between jobs more time consuming than with the CNC method.
The CNC method will require additional hardware (cost unknown at this point), possibly some machining of fixtures (cost again unknown) and then the usual programming and debugging to make it all work. The upside here is that when it is implemented the possibilities are virtually endless as the only changes needing to be made would be programmatic ones, not mechanical ones (as in swapping out gears, etc.).
My question to users of live tooling, both manual and CNC is, no matter which you currently use, if you had to do it all over, would you still choose the method you currently use and why?
Gotta spend money. Gotta make the stimulus plan work. Gotta, Gotta, Gotta.........
Regards,
Stoney
In the short term I think that Chris's solution is the 'quick and dirty' way to go. You just have to know what threads you want to cut, buy the appropriate gears and do it. According to Chris's website additional gears can be added at any time. He supplies what appears to be the most common ones and I doubt I would ever really need to venture far from what he supplies. The downside I see is that there has to be a setup burden that would make transitioning between jobs more time consuming than with the CNC method.
The CNC method will require additional hardware (cost unknown at this point), possibly some machining of fixtures (cost again unknown) and then the usual programming and debugging to make it all work. The upside here is that when it is implemented the possibilities are virtually endless as the only changes needing to be made would be programmatic ones, not mechanical ones (as in swapping out gears, etc.).
My question to users of live tooling, both manual and CNC is, no matter which you currently use, if you had to do it all over, would you still choose the method you currently use and why?
Gotta spend money. Gotta make the stimulus plan work. Gotta, Gotta, Gotta.........
Regards,
Stoney