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Your First Year Running A CNC Mill
So... you’ve finally got a job running a CNC mill. You've perhaps heard somewhere that there's a very good wage to be made running a CNC mill, and you may even have gone to school to learn the trade.
Congratulations.
Let me tell you something: the actual day-to-day work of running a CNC mill is very probably not what you think it is, nor is it what you have been told to expect. It is, instead, something very, VERY different. It's a job with a million subroutines; a job where thousands of pieces of isolated knowledge must be gathered together into a context -- an in-your-head frame of reference that you must build, yourself, within the realm of your own mind. Much of this will be machine-specific, of course... you'll need to create it within yourself with reference to the specific machine that you're working on -- as well as with reference to the specific machine shop that you're working in.
However....
There ARE a few universal truths within the field of CNC that never really get taught in school... concepts that you'll pick up only after spending a few thousand hours on the job actually running a CNC machine.
This short book here contains a few of these, and was written only after spending roughly five-thousand hours on the job running a few different CNC mills. Think of it as a half-hour chat with a guy who started working in CNC maybe a year or two ahead of you, and who is trying to give you the very best advice he can on correct “ways of thinking†about this job of running a CNC machine.
It is, basically, something that I wish I'd had on my first day.
May it save you from 10,000 headaches as you start on your own personal journey with CNC.