I met Fred WAY back when he was just getting Quality One going. Met him right here in the very house/shop I'm sitting in at this moment, as he wanted to meet me; I was one of the first owners of a New Hermes Concept 2000, which is what he started his business around, upgrades, replacement parts and such. He was a pleasant guy, wanted to know what I thought of the machines, if I had any 'improvement' ideas, etc... And actually, I DID have an idea, concerning the toolpaths the machine followed. Back then I was using the machine mostly to engrave computer keycaps, which I'd done for years previously by pantograph. To get the cleanest cut with the least amount of burrs, on keycap plastics anyway, I found that if I backtracked over the first engraving pass in the opposite direction, it cuts the burrs off the sharp corners of M's, A's, W's, etc, very nicely. And I would do this without lifting the stylus, just a continuous run. Easy to do on a pantograph, but CNC machines just make a single pass of each line, lifting the tool when necessary to engrave letters with secondary lines, like E's, A's, etc...
So I asked Fred a question: Would it be possible to create a font that will engrave each character twice, without lifting the tool? He asked what I meant exactly, and I went thru the motions "air engraving" to show him what I meant. He had a laptop computer with him, opened it up, and he retrieved the plot files he had for every character of the Normal Block font. It wasn't the digital plot file, but rather, each character was displayed full-screen size, with every control point of the character. We started with the "A", simple enough, and he says "show me how you'd trace this A"..
Ok, like this: bottom left point, top point, bottom right point, right dash point, left dash point, right dash point, top point, bottom left point-
Then I explained how that path covered every line twice, in the reverse order, with no lifting necessary. For the B, just engrave like an 8 starting at the left-middle point then reverse it. C and D are obvious,
E, top right, top left, center left, center right, center left, bottom left, bottom right, bottom left, top left, top right...
etc, etc... Fred would retrace the path of each letter on his laptop point by point as I'd showed him. He caught on quickly on how to do this himself, and sat at my work table and did several more characters before we parted ways.
My BIL still uses our second C2000 every day, it has Fred's C2000 upgrade kit in it, and the software is loaded with Fred's "no-lift" fonts, because the work great!
I don't know how much money he's made off my idea, but it was a good one, and ttbomk I've never gotten a bit of credit for it. To be fair, I never pursued the issue... but still...
Other than that one day, and a brief phone call a short time after that is all the personal interaction I've ever had with him. I will agree he does fill a necessary niche in this business, but I'm not too aware of his biz practices.
C'est la vie
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Originally Posted by Dylan ritterbeck
- My V5000's Z stepper sometimes walks up or down, usually down, which isn't good, main reason is I'm using a New Hermes Bodine motor on the thing, and the Bodine and stepper are right against each other. I fixed it the problem by wrapping the motor with some trophy aluminum and fitting a rubber pad between the motors. 
