Scary stuff - she has cut her first steel

Spent the morning putting stuff back - trammed the head, fitted the vise and trammed that in, fitted a floating Z touch-plate and modified the touch-off macro so it did what i wanted.

Threw a small lump of 20mm scrap in, a duff 1/2" four-flute cutter and programmed a facing cut in Aspire of 0.5mm, seemed way slower than i would have moved if doing it manually - may not be a bad thing. It gave me a speed of 140mm/min at 650rpm

Picture below - looks worse than it is, pretty good finish as it goes considering the state of the tool etc. and dry cutting plus unknown grade of steel.

Click image for larger version.  Name: IMG_1482s.jpg  Views: 356  Size: 1.44 MB  ID: 18928

Next I tried spot-drilling four places and followed up with through-drilling with a 6mm drill, all went perfectly.

I really need to sort the speed control out though - it tells me when to put it in back-gear or high/low speed so the VFD can give me the final speed BUT it only does this when it gets the S command from the code - it shows the message on screen but the carries on cutting at the wrong speed. What i need is for it to stop the spindle and show the message, wait for me to set the right conditions and the restart the spindle and get to work.