Dick,

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While I already knew this it can cause a great deal of confusion. For instance, if you have a horizontal mill with a vertical attachment and half way through a milling job you switch from one spindle to the other do you also change your references? Or on a combo mill like the Rockwell, where both axes are ready to go at any time, same question. You can probably find numerous other situations which create such confusions.

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Even though I'm familiar with the "Z = spindle axis" concept, for non-commercial or amateur usage it's probably more useful to adopt the terms longitudinal, cross, and vertical, longitudinal being the long horizontal axis, cross being the short horizontal axis, and vertical you can probably figure out yourself.

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I know that you can argue against what I've just said. One man's opinion. And by the way, on a vertical mill you may very well have two vertical axes, the quill and the knee, each of which needs to be treated separately. Yes, I know about X, Y, Z, A, B, C, etc.

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Anthony

Berkeley, Calif.