[rwskinner]

Ah, a standard sheet metal brake. We were thinking you had a press brake which uses a hydraulic press to push dies together. Now I understand.

Richard

[109jb]

jid2, I have been considering that brake for my shop but I had a question. Does the brake have the provision to adjust the "setback"?

[jid2]

Got my first installment of TTS stuff. I can easily see the desire to acquire large amounts of it and be super organized with it. The thing that struck me was that I have very few tools that have 1/4 shanks. Most of the tools with smaller than 3/8" cutting areas still have 3/8" shanks, until you get down to 1/8" at which point you need to use ER20 collets. So I can see myself buying a crap ton of 3/8" set screw holders and then a bunch of ER20's for the 1/8" and smaller stuff. Then maybe a boring head, and a face mill of some sort......

Going to try and start making chips this weekend. Just need to finish the missing front panel, and plug the access hole on the stand/try under the machine. If I did this again I wouldn't bother with the hole under the machine. It's a real pain to seal up, and I'm not sure the access is worth the hassle.

[Starleper1]

HSS cutters under 3/8" usually have a 3/8" shank. Carbide cutters usually have the same shank size as the size of the cutter.

What are you going to make?

[jid2]

^^^^ That's what I was thinking - I'm sure I knew that but hadn't really internalized how that effects my tooling strategy. I'll likely start using more carbide when I swap to belt drive.

As for chip making, I still have a good number of parts to build for the machine, which I would like to get done and past. Although I feel like it might take a while. I have endless personal and work projects that are on the list as well. This thing will get used, and I image it will be doing more complex stuff once I'm ready for it - maybe some 4th axis type stuff. We do crazy things at work - we just got a shipment of parts done with 5 axis hottness. I won't try those projects - but more standard stuff that needs a quick turn I might try.

Parts for the mill itself:

- Electronics connector panel.
- Encoder housings.
- Motor plate.
- Motor side plates.
- Power draw bar brackets
- Pulley for spindle and motor (lathe)
- Coolant manifold.

Real projects:

- Death barge flame thrower brackets
- Random Death barge parts
- Position specific billet aluminum foosball men
- 2011 9mm open race gun
- Super low-profile open race gun red dot sight
- Semi-Auto magazine feed shotgun - designed from scratch
- EVO control arms and brackets
- Blow Off Valve - designed from scratch
- Work stuff: aka consumer electronics, and medical device parts.

[Starleper1]

Are you into RC at all? I thought you were for some reason.

Make sure you post all those projects

[jid2]

Ive had a bunch of R/C stuff in my life, but its not an active interest for me. Death Barge is a short term exception. Its a flame thrower death-bot boat used in a buddies 4th of July party. The idea is wooden boats that are pulled around with strings and launch fireworks. Death Barge drives around and sets the other boats on fire. He's built 2 previous versions over the years, this version is taking it to the next level.

[ebrewste]

When I was dealing with tooling, I realized that I could really narrow down my shank size range with little compromise. I use 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 3mm. Then you can focus on finding a good deal and buying in bulk. I also decided to never use r8 collets anymore, to avoid Z height repeatability issues. I use almost exclusively r8 - er16 holders for < 1/2" and end mill holders for 1/2". Narrowing down on the size lets you buy more of the collet sizes you use, and less that just sit around. I bought two full range er16 sets for misc work and lots in 1/4 and 1/2. Once you go into the cnc world, you don't want to set tools all the time with r8 collets. Also, I don't see the point of oddball size end mills. I just circular interpolate everything. If I need to make a hole extra round or precise, reamers and boring are better (for modest CNC equipment like ours) accuracy, anyway. I also skipped hss because carbide is cheap from maritool, lakeshore, etc. I'm not saying that hss is bad, but I didn't see the point of it. It isn't cheap in high quality.

I don't mean to try to sell you on my system, but rather am trying to encourage you to spend more time thinking up a tooling system strategy that works for you. It saves lots of money and will leave you with more useful tools.

Your project is turning out really well, and you make progress very fast - it's fun to read.

[doorknob]

Just curious - how did you make the cM5k logo that you applied to the front edge of the bent aluminum chip guard? (I think that's a chip guard)

[jid2]

Thanks for the thoughts on tooling - they are welcomed for sure. I haven't had enough thinking time to devise a strategy - but I'll need to do it soon. This project is moving pretty slow in my book, but I'm glad others think it is making progress.

All the stickers on the machine are cut with this vinyl cutter, a Creation PCut:
Creation PCUT Vinyl Cutter

[Lob]

- EVO control arms and brackets
- Blow Off Valve - designed from scratch

jid2, is there your thread about this on EvoM or may be somewhere else?
That's interesting
Thanks

[kensbey]

i think its awesome that you have such a wide range of projects in mind! Whats your approach for the BOV if you dont mind me asking. Also, do you want to build one just because you can, or are you trying to accomplish something current commecial models don't?

[jid2]

jid2, is there your thread about this on EvoM or may be somewhere else?
That's interesting
Thanks

There's a build thread of my car on EvoM, lots of stuff in there. Just search my username. The BOV would just be something to do for fun, I'm interested to see if I can create something that works well at part-throttle and holds boost, and understand what design elements effect those things. Only a few of the available BOV's work well at part throttle in road race scenarios.

Had a good weekend and made some progress. Still have a ways to go, but I getting to the real business now.

I finished off the enclosure. Made the removable front section of the pan, welded on brackets to fasten the top to the pan and added a gasket between them. Added some clear acrylic panels on top to contain chips moving it that direction and allow visibility. I used some hinges in the rear so I can lift them up when I slide the shower curtain around. It's not totally streamlined, but works well.




I also got a little rolling tooling cart to tuck under the machine and store the high use items. Its just a standard storage rack without the upper section of the tubes screwed together and with some casters added. Works awesome.



Yesterday I started on the chip making journey. Turns out I should have named the machine partMake 5000. Chips are cool, but parts are the goal - only got chips yesterday. My buddy was over and we were trying to knock out some parts of his as the trial run. But I hadn't really tuned the machine for accuracy, we flew through tramming the head and hacked out some CAM. So we got poor surface finish and some oval shaped holes. I also realized I still hadn't bought a Mach 3 license and could only run 500 lines of code.

So I need to spend some time shaking out a few things, and doing a better job getting the machine trammed, and axes tuned to do real work. I also need to do a bunch of test cuts and figure out what the machine wants for cuts and speeds and such. But it's cool and nerve racking to see the machine cutting metal.

Here's the first metal test cut. This went really well.



This one didn't. Poor facing surface finish, and oval shaped hole.



The setup for the day.



I still need a much better understanding of what the CAM is doing, or just have more time to program. Seems like that is the area where you get into trouble. Here a little video making some chips.

cM5k first cuts - pocket.wmv - YouTube

[Starleper1]

What CAM are you using? Get yourself a subscription to GWizard. It takes out the guess work on feeds and speeds.

[jid2]

For CAM I'm using HSMworks, which doesn't do real speeds and feeds calculations, I also have a trial of CAMworks, which does have a speeds and feeds I just haven't got to it yet.

I used Ray's app for the trial cuts and things seem OK. I just want to experiment with things like traditional full width cuts and how deep I can go vs full depth of cutter and how much radial engagement I can do. I know alot of the guys building parts on these size of machines often cut parts out of "plate" material - that seems like the norm. For me I think I'll be doing alot more stuff where I'm wanting to profile stuff that is well over 1.0" thick - those seem a little more sketchy. And HSMworks is setup to do those full length of cutter toolpaths - I just need to do some test cuts with some different parameters and see how things go before I try and make actual parts with those toolpaths.

[jid2]

Checking some things off my list - like crashing the machine for the first time.

I was trimming a fairly unsupported edge of .25" thick plate with a profile cut and worried about chatter so I had my hand on the e-stop switch. I was holding it a little too firmly and triggered it, causing an e-stop. I then went and cleared it and hit cycle start again. I'm not positive, but I believe I missed the the line which retracted the cutter - so the machine went to rapid to the next position with the cutter fully engaged. It made it about 0.5" then stalled the spindle and whacked the head way out of tram.

I removed the slightly bent stock and checked for damage. Everything looks OK. End mill still seems fine, and motion is good in every axis. I'll see If I can salvege the part this evening. I think I can.

I need to go back and verify the code was OK in that section, and then go back to making chips.

[FannBlade]

Checking some things off my list - like crashing the machine for the first time.

Hate to hear that. You can check that off my list also.

Really like the looks of the machine with chip tray nice professional look.
Did you get all the SS bugs worked out?

[jid2]

Ethernet smooth stepper has seemed to resolve all the control issues thankfully.

I believe I made a major break through on my poor surface finish. Turns out if you don't tighten the bolts that hold the column to the base you're likely to have poor surface finish.

I then went through the pain staking process of slipping shims under the column to get it square with the base. I got it OK for now with my 6" square, it's within about .001" with respect to X and Y. I found that the column wanders about .005" with respect to X as you get near the top. It was basically zero'd up the square and then in the last inch of it it shifts a couple thousands quickly. I'll likely go and try and really dial it in after I get belt drive and PDB mounted on the head. I then put a .005" shim under the bottom lip of the head to Z-saddle and got the head trammed back in.

Looking to go back and finish my connector panel now and see if finish is back where I think it should be.

[jid2]

double post

[jid2]

Here's a photo of squaring the column.



Kinda finished up the first part, which is the connector panel for the electronics box. I'm going to go clean up the surfaces of the pockets now that the column of the mill isn't moving all over. You can see the corner where the machine crashed - trying to cut a full width slot at 120 IPM.



I used the HSMWorks adaptive clearing toolpaths on half the big pockets and traditional toolpaths on the others. I also used them to create the slots for venting. For the slots they are .20" wide and in .25" thick material. I used a .125" endmill cutting at .14" depth (112%) and .037" width (30%) with the HSM toolpaths. With my max spindle speed of 1970 rpm I started at 4 IPM feedrate and ramped them up to a little over 10 IPM and things went pretty smoothly. That painted the range of conservative to aggressive in G-Wizard.

Here's a crappy cell phone video of some of the cutting.

cM5k - PM45 CNC milling machine first part - YouTube