Tormach PCNC 770 Helps Inprentus Create Fast Fixture Solutions

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

There’s nothing run of the mill about today’s Check It Out offering. It’s got complex, precision-made scientific instruments, synchrotron facilities and a bunch of down-to-earth, incredibly smart people doing fascinating things cleverly. You do, however, have a CNC (computer numerically controlled) mill. It’s not routine either.

When you hit today’s link, you land on a page titled “Tormach PCNC 770 Helps Inprentus Create Fast Fixture Solutions.” We’ll call it a success story in words and video. But it’s too straightforward to stuff into that pigeonhole, which often means pep rally. So take both in. The story requires a couple of reading minutes; the video runs 4:41 (scroll to the bottom to watch).

This is all about a guy at Argonne National Lab building a beamline to study superconductivity using X-ray scattering experiments. The companies making diffraction gratings needed for the beamline go belly up.

Rather than “what-iffing” his life away for a steady paycheck, he forms a company to make the gratings. His team builds this machine that places hundreds of thousands of lines on a gold film for X-ray optics. Some of the end products look like those flashing gizmos restaurants hand you so that you know when your table is ready.

Anyway, this is all custom stuff. No one-size-fits-all scientific instruments here. Complicating this is that they’re building a second machine for more sophisticated gratings. That project means endless amounts of R&D, prototyping, assimilating learned somethings, razing and rebuilding.

Now, try servicing existing custom orders and prototyping a second one-of-a-kind machine together. See the problem? These people constantly modify and customize plates and workholdings they get from laboratory suppliers.

How would you handle that? Wait a week or four for a machine shop? Or do it yourself in 10 minutes? No brainer. They opted for a PCNC 770 model CNC milling machine to dispatch these jobs. It keeps prototyping moving fast.

What they have to say about the PCNC 770 will get you, and it’s not at all what you expect from a success story. Two lines tease to you: “We didn’t need another project.” And: “We needed something that worked, that was fast, didn’t cost an arm and a leg and wasn’t over-engineered.”

“Tormach PCNC 770 Helps Inprentus Create Fast Fixture Solutions” rewards your consideration with thought-provoking information. Kudos to Tormach for letting the engineers speak and not beating you over the head with pom-poms. Hit today’s Check It Out link and enjoy.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering 

Check out “Tormach PCNC 770 Helps Inprentus Create Fast Fixture Solutions” here.