Southwestern Industries, Inc.
TRAK
EMX Knee Mill, Bed Mill & ProtoTRAK
EMX CNC Retrofit Safety, Programming, Operating & Care Manual
63
14.0 ProtoTRAK EMX Tutorial
The purpose of this tutorial is to help you to learn the operation and programming of the
ProtoTRAK EMX. We’ve repeated some of the information found elsewhere in this manual so
that you could go through this tutorial without flipping back and forth between pages. We
will not cover all the operations of the ProtoTRAK EMX, just enough to get you comfortably
started.
If you have been running a knee mill with a DRO, the ProtoTRAK EMX is about to make your
life a lot easier. Just stay with this program for a couple of hours and you'll be making more
parts with less effort in no time.
We assume you know how to run a knee mill, know how to read a blueprint, and have at
least a little experience inputting information into a box like a digital readout or a computer.
We told you this would be easy.
14.1 Working with Definitions, Terms, and Conventions
This first section contains some paper-and-pencil exercises to help get you warmed up and
to clear up some stuff that may trip you
up later. It isn’t hard, to just take the twenty
minutes or so you need to get through it.
X, Y, Plus (+), Minus (-)
The ProtoTRAK EMX works in the Cartesian Coordinate System. This is the common number
line system that we can use to plot the location of a point in two dimensions, X and Y. Any
given point may be located exactly by plotting its position on the X and Y axes. For
example, the point A below is at point X = 2, Y = 1, or (2,1).
