hey all,
I'm a co-owner of a small shop in Israel where we build audio equipment, mostly for guitars. almost everything is hand made and this began to be a problem lately as work volume increased (thank god).
we would like to save a little time by automating a few processed that take us too much time by hand. one is the drilling of metal enclosures and the second is producing front panel for a few of our devices (which we order from a shop and it costs too much).
first of all i would like to make it clear that we are working with small enclosures nothing is more than 5" long by 3" wide and 2" high. we have to drill them for potentiometers, switches and jacks. since everything has to be very precise this is a time consuming job and until now i used a friend's mill to drill the boxes and 30 of them took 8 hours to drill and I'm working rather quickly!
a nice opportunity came along and someone i know asked me if I'm interested in an Emco F1 desktop mill. it has some trouble with the motor that he wasn't sure about but said that it worked. i am thinking to take it and if the motor is bad i can always get a new one because the rig was free anyway.
i was thinking to program this mill so it could drill the entire box in one go, it has a tool changer as far as i saw so that could be reasonable to do right?
my boxes are made from cast aluminum so they are easy to machine.
the second job i need to machine is to cut out 4mm thick aluminum panels and drill them to fabricate the front panels for a few of my devices.
problem is i have no experience with CNC. i come from electronics background and at a time i was into programming but now i am only very good with computers
so how should i start if this seems to be a reasonable thing to do.
thanks!