After spending a couple hours figuring out how the DB works and if it makes sense to give it a home I cracked the Overton books...
Spent the last 3 hours reading the multi hundred page manual for the Overton. I've never taken hallucinogenic drugs, but I've heard they profoundly expand your mind. I suspect reading the manual for this Overton has got to be a similar experience for some people.
I think I may have fucked up and bought the most complex electro-hydro-mechanical device ever conceived.
This thing does everything. I mean everything. It doesn't need CNC. It has it baked right in there. Everything you could imagine. It does it.
It does axial feed, radial feed, tangential feed, or get this, it does diagonal feed- You can cut a spur or helical with simultaneous axial and tangential feed using the entire cutting length of the hob. You can do it in one cut, two cuts or even 3 cuts. When it's not cutting it's got rapids. It doesn't just rapid retract and back to start, no, it can rapid between gear faces if your stacked blanks have a gap between them. If you're too lazy to work out the math for diagonal feed, but still want to implement hob shift it will automatically apply an incremental tangential hob shift after every batch of parts is finished.
Everything is pressure lubricated. To facilitate climb hobbing- Every. Single. Gear. In this thing is hobbed on a taper and mounted in eccentrics and the details of achieving zero backlash are described in excruciating detail. Every special tool you need to work on this thing has a print to make it from scratch. Everything that moves or spins in this machine has ground reference surfaces protected by sleeves or collars so you can check runout. The hob column has an adjustment mechanism for tramming to the work spindle. The manual has a chart giving recommendations for how many tenths to tip the column for how hard your material is and how far from the work table the hob will be.
Gears are neat. As a machine nerd- Gear machines are neater!