My Build - I blame you lot for this....!

[BillTodd]

Very nice job Steve :)

[HiltonSteve]

Just been playing with my new toy.

Just made this.....

Cycle time 7 mins
Cutter - Solid carbide 6mm dia 3 flute endmill
Spindle speed - No.2 on Kress router
Depth of cut - 2mm
Feedrate -800mm/min

Made a bit of noise and a lot of mess but i am quite impressed, just did it all in one pass, next time i will rough it and finish it then it should come out even nicer.

[John S]

Yabut when Kip gets his free to a good home plasma working it will do the same thing in 5 seconds in hardened steel to 4 microns.

Alltogether now "We don't want no skeenking alloy"

:rofl:

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[HiltonSteve]

Stop it Now. . .. . your teasing me on purpose.:nope:
Looks great to me just has is mate. . . . . If my machine cuts like that I,ll be well chuffed.

Another pic below of the finished article, just had to finish it off..!

When we going to see a vid of it in action.

Kip take note, A "router" cutting the " Occasional bit of Ali ":rofl:

Charging video camera now, will have vid posted tomorrow for you.

Hemsworthlad, do you have a spindle mount yet for that machine you are building??

[HiltonSteve]

Made it all myself, let me know what you want in it and I will see what I can do.

[HiltonSteve]

OK latest update...

Been trying to mill a 3D rooster from the Cut 3D demo program this afternoon and found a problem with my machine, after doing a finishing cut with a 3mm ballnose it returned to x0 y0 and was about 3-5mm out. I put it down to loosing steps and tried different settings in the motor tuning by changing the velocity and accel, made absolutely no difference at all.

Then I remebered that I had upped the kernal speed when trying 1/16th stepping so I dropped it down from 45k back to 25k and hey presto, no more lost steps, in fact the motors are running a lot smoother and the ballscrews vibration seems to have dissapeared.

Don't fully understand this so if someone could explain why the kernel speed was so critical I would be interested to know.

I am ruuning mach on an old compaq P3 866mhz machine but in the driver setup program it said it was running 'excellent' at 45k.

[John S]

You must be nuts to run at that kernal speed.

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[HiltonSteve]

You must be nuts to run at that kernal speed.

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Had to up the kernal speed because it was limiting the max speed of the motors. At 1/16th microstepping I was set at 3200 steps per mm which meant the max i could get the velocity to was about 460mm / min.