Poll reveals CNC likes and dislikes

CTE’s “CNC Chef,” Bob Warfield, polled the readers of his CNCCookbook blog in September on what they like and dislike about their CNCs.

On the dislike side, he reported that those surveyed mentioned these shortcomings:

• “inadequate work offsets or other features needed to control the coordinate system”;
• “inability to monitor the control via the web”;
• “lack of features related to tool data management”; and
• “missing features [such as conversational CNC] that make shop-floor programming easier.”

CNC Engineering Manager Paul Webster of FANUC America Corp., Rochester Hills, Mich., sympathizes. All the capabilities longed for by survey respondents are available in FANUC controls but not on every FANUC-controlled machine, he said.

Image courtesy FANUC America

“When we sell a control, we sell it to a machine tool builder. Machine tool models are differentiated based on performance and cost. Builders compete against each other and differentiate among their own lines on those bases,” he said.

Webster explained that machine tool builders look at a full menu of CNC options and choose the ones they want based on where they plan to position a given model in the marketplace.