What is meant by (adjective) precision?

What I've learned over some years, and I'm not a machinist, is everything means nothing. IOW you can put a moron in front of a high precision (sorry) machine and get sorry sorry results. You can put a master in front of junk and he/she will produce something marvelous. This isn't to say a machine or instrumemt can't limit you. But there are often tricks that can be employed to get results that are otherwise unobtainable. An accurate machine makes it easier to produce high expectations.

I realize this doesn't speak specifically to the.OPs question. All those terms are meaningless without numbers.
 
G-ManBart said:
I'm curious how you know most of their customers are engineers? Most machinists aren't engineers, so why would PM have the market on engineers buying machinery? I can't imagine after all these years they don't know their customer base, and going off the posts I see about people buying them few mention being engineers.
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I'm including machining w/in engineering. I should probably have said machinists instead. The point remains the same, I believe.
 
G-ManBart said:
I'm curious how you know most of their customers are engineers? Most machinists aren't engineers, so why would PM have the market on engineers buying machinery? I can't imagine after all these years they don't know their customer base, and going off the posts I see about people buying them few mention being engineers.
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I think that their advertising would be appalling if their customer base is mostly machinists. I admit to having limited experience but the two customer-machinists I know deal w/ hard numbers, and do not work to precision, ultra precision descriptors. I know for a fact that at least two of their customers have engineering backgrounds...and most of the engineers I've met over the years also tend to deal w/ specifics and not nebulous adspeak. My guess is PM's ad copy is written for newbys and hobbyists to get the points across described by Mr. Best.
 
Geswearf said:
I think that their advertising would be appalling if their customer base is mostly machinists. I admit to having limited experience but the two customer-machinists I know deal w/ hard numbers, and do not work to precision, ultra precision descriptors. I know for a fact that at least two of their customers have engineering backgrounds...and most of the engineers I've met over the years also tend to deal w/ specifics and not nebulous adspeak. My guess is PM's ad copy is written for newbys and hobbyists to get the points across described by Mr. Best.
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I'm not saying I know the makeup of PM's customer base, I just don't think it's mostly/largely engineers. Still, for all this fuss over nebulous terms, nobody has pointed a finger at Hardinge for doing the exact same thing years before PM.

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If ever a name brand could stand on it's reputation ... and terminology ... it's the H.
 
Does a vice have to be nearly perfect to work well enough for a hobby machinist? I bought a used decent (Jet) mill that had a horrid Chinese vice. But the last guy had obviously used it a lot. How he managed to hold parts with jaws that enclinded out at the top by 10º secapes me. Not being able to understand what various marketing BS meant, I opted to by what seemed likely to be very good. A new Kurt 6". Translated, that meant that I was paying a lot to ensure that what I bought would work w/o hassels. I'll bet there are lots of import vices that would have served me just as well, but no way of measuring! Speaking of measuring, how do you know that those - to the .0001" numbers, are what you will get. Do they matter? Where is the fine print? Ten years later and a lot of import experience later, most of what I have works perfectly fine. Some were more kit like than others. Very few couldn't be made to work well enough.
 
It's ALL marketing. Let me give a real example.
I got their ultra precision keyless chuck with my machine. The morse taper is so poor that when drilling a hole and then retracting the tail stock using the crank the bit, the chuck and all stays in the hole. I called them to fix it. Their response, "sometimes you need to scuff of the morse taper with sandpaper". I've since bought some quality tapers. including one to replace the ultra precision cr*p.
In general the lathe 1440GT is a decent machine but don't put this company on a pedestal. They are just average machines with average parts. You might also look up my post showing how the carriage fills with coolant.
 
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