CNC Programming Handbook, Third Edition

I bought this text mainly for its treatment of cnc lathes. My training was only in cnc machining centers (mills), we used the Lynch text. I'll give you a simple calculation to engage you a little. The z coordinate moves along the axis of rotation of the shaft or workpiece with the x coordinate being the radial distance (signed) of the cutter from the axis of rotation. Say you'd like to cut a helix or screw threads on this rod or shaft, uniformly spaced of course. With one revolution of the shaft your screw would advance one thread and be at the beginning of the next one.You want t threads per inch (TPI). The distance advanced in one revolution is then (1/t) inches per thread or revolution.The rate the cutter must travel along the z direction is then (1/t)xRPM where RPM is the rotation rate of the shaft in revolutions per minute. This RPM will depend on the material of the shaft-cutting speed which you look up in the machinery handbook.This rate or feedrate you see then is in inches per minute. By the way x can be given a feedrate also for a taper say.This little blurb is just to give you some idea and get you thinking mechanically. Next for the review: You're assumed to know how to read prints and mainly how to picture in your mind or sketch the object from a standard 3 view orthographic projection drawing (front view, right side view, and top view). The front view actually gives y and z coordinates of the points of your object, right side view gives x and z, top gives x and y. This is why given two views you can draw the third using a miter line (inclined 45 degrees with respect to the y axis anywhere in the y-z plane). This is as bad as it gets and this of course pertains to a machining center. For a lathe a 2 view or even single view will suffice. The coordinate assignment which you can get right off the print as soon as you choose a convenient origin (called program zero) as explained above will be the coordinates used in your program. G codes give cutting tool movements with or without a feedrate from point to point. M codes give machine state like spindle rotates clockwise or counter clockwise or spindle stops and returns home. Enough-Send Cash! The author uses Fanuc control codes which is nearly standard as other controls may have some slight differences if any-you'll have to check the manuals. Tool movement codes are illustrated and clearly explained. Whole examples are given from print to program-quite good. A nice feature is the CD with the free 2 week trial of NCPlot software which allows you to enter your program on your pc and see the result when you run it. I would use this toward the end though if you don't plan on buying it. If you followed along so far mostly you could learn it self-study from this text. In truth there's software that reads print details from a SolidWorks file for instance and writes a good deal of the program for you. Still it's a good skill to learn, you'll need it to interpret what the CAM software is doing and to know where your input is required.

Totally awesome. I missed out on so much schooling when it comes to CNC and education directed at people loving craft mechanics and mathematics.

Super handy guide to fanuc programming.

Book has lots of information and will take me quit some time to get thru, but has already helped provide clarity in the programming language and process

Update 10/1/16: I have received a couple of thoughtful comments suggesting that my review is unfair because the book is not intended to cover graphical CAD/CAM tools, and that the use of machine-level coding is still an important part of programming CAD/CAM systems. I think their points are well made and may be based on greater knowledge of current practices than mine. So I have revised my rating to four stars and clarifying my concerns in this note. I encourage you to read Mr. Bleier's comments on this review for further insights. --------------------- This is highly detailed and comprehensive treatment of numerical control (NC) milling machines and lathes, but it is based on the premise that the reader is interested in manually coding the machine, and all the examples consist of dense lines of machine-level numeric code. The book reads like it was written twenty years ago, and it essentially ignores all the amazing progress of the last several decades of CAD/CAM software evolution. Of the 500+ pages of content, only the last 16 are devoted to the use of graphical systems to design and produce three-dimensional objects. The author introduces this final chapter by assuring the reader that the reading the book up to this point "has not been a waste of time" -- which strikes me as a pretty revealing comment -- then goes on to explain what a mouse is and how it can speed things up as compared to using a keyboard. This is clearly a highly regarded text in the CNC field, but I would recommend it only for those who will use these machines extensively and need to go deep into the details of how high-level designs are translated into low-level machine controls and tool paths. If this is what you need to know, this is the book for you. If you simply want to use a CAD/CAM system to design and produce a part, the book is unlikely to be of much value to you.

I know some people are being critical about this book because it was written by a non-native English speaker and you can sometimes tell. Big deal! As a CNC programming book i think this as good as it gets. I bought a CNC mill a few months ago and started learning to program it by actually making parts for a staircase out of aluminum. I needed cutting, drilling, countersinking, slotting, tapping etc. This book has everything i needed and more. Whatever i needed to know, it is there, with much detail, real example G-Code ready to be used. I took this project step by step, completing a part as far as i could then tackling the next challenge. Always went back to this book and found what i needed. Never once did i not find anything of thought this could have been explained in more detail. I think this book is absolutely brilliant and i highly recommend it.

I purchased this in New Condition. Very Nice Quality and a Very Informative book. Required for a couple Manufacturing Classes I'm taking. Usually a "Cheap" College Textbook is paperback and seems slapped together. This is a Hardback copy and the overall quality is amazing for the price. The only thing that bothers me is, as an analytical reader I catch quite a few spelling errors and I'm not but 5 chapters in. A lot more errors than I would anticipate out of a published text. However it's not a major deal, and the simplest minded person can easily tell what is being said. As always, Amazon has the best price and availability.

Description is wrong. Does not come with CD-ROM as of 2021, and accompanying code and examples need to be downloaded from publisher website and NCPlot website.

Only book on the market that I know of, that is suitable for cnc programmers and machinists. Covers a wide array of gcodes, still like the machinery handbook the book should be revised to make it suitable to new standards and new codes. Covers basic cartesian mapping to help you understand how to localise you parts with zero set. Macro programming is also covered great (sub programming). I wish that book would have been mandatory during my 3 years studies to become a machinist. Price is a bit steep from my point of view since it's almost a dying trade. We are a rare breed of birds. That book makes us honnor. I strongly recommend it to lost teachers... students with lost teachers... apprentices that had lost teachers. Even long time machinists that are working in the field of CNC always working on the same parts since your brain tends to forget over time, the book is great for referal use in case you're not sure wich canned cycle to use. Cheers to all my machinists brother around the world.

Excellent, comprehensive book, well detailed, good value.

I got the book in just 10 days very fast considering it was dispatched from USA. Very good book for learning CNC programming

No serious list of CNC books can be complete without this corner stone book, and for good reason. Put simply, it is THE book by which all CNC programming books are compared to. For the obvious reason that it is perhaps the most authorative, practical, and in-depth work on the subject, but maybe because it's all three combined. Being a 3rd edition, Peter Smid has obviously updated this book twice over the years, clearly uses and tracks new developments, and his other industry-grade CNC books are "generally useful" in many ways as well. In short, Peter is a serious CNC operating and authoring force to be reckoned with.... and I've read a LOT of CNC related books... mostly because it's my hobby and I've been working with them in various maker spaces for years now. Yes there are other CNC programming books, but this has been incredibly helpful in my self study. While many CNC users don't necessarily need to program all your CNC projects from scratch, there's a lot of benefit in knowing how to use G-Code effectively. GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF THE BOOK: Like many of my fellow CNC hobbyists out there, I too used a slicer app (if I'm using a 3D printer) or CAM software (CAMBAM initially, then Fusion360 later) app to do most of my gcode generation. It makes sense to do things this way for complex CNC tasks, as it takes thousands of lines of code to do detailed, non-linear work. Typing all that out is just impractical. However, many machinists and fabricators know that the majority of projects are dominated by making a number of simpler components, and the complexity lies in combining many such parts. Personally, my experience agrees with this view. If you make a lot of simpler projects (say a few drilled holes, and some straight line carving) then let me ask you this... Is it quite so efficient if you run your CAD app, go to the trouble of drawing your model, processing it in CAM software, then transferring it to your CNC machine? Don't get me wrong, it'll work... but you can write the entire (albeit simple) program from scratch in under 2 minutes if you know some gcode. Now this is a book even nut jobs like me struggle to read from cover to cover. That's ok, because it's a reference book. It's closer to a dictionary than novel. That said, I find it quite easy to grab, look up a particular G-code action, and quickly get "the gist". The structure of each entry has a rather comprehensive structure: -the blurb/description, -several varieties of the example code, -the convenient image(s) depicting the resulting real-world action(s). Peter has then gone even beyond that by: -adding tips and tricks, -certain short cuts, -how to approach the same action using different strategies and reference points, -outline each techniques pros, their cons.... and of course -some of the quirks professional machines have. If you want to take your actual G-Code skills to a pro level, then this book should absolutely be in your library. But let's be realistic about expectations on this book. THE DRAWBACKS OF THIS BOOK: There are limitations because this book is so fundamentally specialised to programming. It's certainly not an introductory book.... There's no general machine operations like how to do work holding, zeroing, no bit types, or trouble shooting. This is pure theory without machine-based context... more like a foreign language dictionary where you know what you want to say/do, but have to look up the corresponding G-code. Just because you know the correct code, doesn't mean it will work on your machine! In fact, there's no consideration for whether any specific code is appropriate for the machine you're using. (For instance, if you run a 5 axis machine built with a robotic arm as opposed to a DIY machine using standard 3 axis gantry, and a rotating/tilting base/saddle mount doing the remaining 2 axes. In this case, the way a particular machine is built, will need profoundly different G-code to do the same thing). Is this book good value? Conclusion: At anywhere between $112-to nearly $300 (Australian), this is no small investment. That said.. for the right people, it might well be under priced... if there's a better book on the subject, as clearly written, and with every conceivable way to convey the information, pretty graphs depicting machine movement, code exerpts, and lots of additional advice... please let me know! I've gotten a lot of benefit in making simple programs, and looking things up when certain quirky behaviours pop up mid-simulation. This alone has saved me THOUSANDS of dollars in time and materials. So if you're at a stage where coding and assessing other people's code is a benefit (or planning to get there) then I highly recommend this book.

Det är med största vördnad jag härmed tillkännager mina intryck av den lärda skriften "CNC Programmering, Upplaga 3" författad av den framstående Peter Schmit. Detta verk, som avhandlar konsten att bemästra numeriskt styrda maskiner, står som en lysande fyrbåk för såväl lärjungar som mästare inom det mekaniska hantverkets ädla fält. Boken erbjuder en struktur så klar och välsignad med logik, att även den nybörjare, som för första gången beträder denna komplexa värld, finner sig tryggt ledsagad. Varje kapitel framstår som en mästerligt utformad byggsten, och författaren visar en sådan förståelse för ämnets djup, att hans lärdom tycks närmast gränsa till inspiration. Diagrammen, så omsorgsfullt illustrerade, och de praktiska exemplen, så väl valda, skänker liv åt teorin och förankrar den i verklighetens praktiska bruk. Dock, en anmärkning värd att anföra, är att språket stundom lutar åt det tekniska och torra, vilket måhända avskräcker de mindre erfarna. En något mer målande stil hade kunnat föra innehållet än närmare fulländning. Sammanfattningsvis är detta en skrift av yttersta vikt för den som söker bemästra CNC-programmeringens konst, en ovärderlig pärla i den lärdes bibliotek.