El Beast - Initial design phase, comments and critique welcomed!

[Zeeflyboy]

Made one of the screw mounting plates:






Flipped for the rear side, it was previously held down at the near edge too but I removed the front clamp to run the chamfer.




Unfortunately it's way too tall to fit into the CNC for drilling the sides, so I 3D printed another jig and made some drill bushings on the Lathe:






Nice snug fit:




Drilled and tapped:




Assembled:






Fitting to the machine reminded me that I need to flip the nuts on the screws and also showed a small design tweak that's required to then give the nut clearance, other than that though the fit is spot on regarding heights and spacing.

[Desertboy]

Damn, that's some very nice work there.

[routercnc]

Sorry to hear about your troubles in post 170. Annoying when the part is big like that and expensive to replace.

Drill guide templates are very handy to make sure the holes are precisely where you want them. Got some more to do in my build later on.

When you flip the ball nuts have you got some metal tubing to roll them onto to keep the balls in place? If not I can measure the tube I use so you can turn something down.

Good work - keep it up

[Zeeflyboy]

Cheers desert.

Sorry to hear about your troubles in post 170. Annoying when the part is big like that and expensive to replace.

Yeah very annoying, but could have been worse I suppose...

When you flip the ball nuts have you got some metal tubing to roll them onto to keep the balls in place? If not I can measure the tube I use so you can turn something down.

They came with some plastic tubes actually, but thanks. Of course I tried to use the Z-axis 1604 ball screw's tube for the 1605 and the end result is that tonight I learned how to re-pack a ball nut lol. Thankfully I did it all in a sandwich bag so no balls were lost. Helps when you use the right tube

Other than that I made the required design tweaks and modified the plate... I wanted to give the cutout that clears the motor mount a little more clearance and I also made room for the flipped nut.

Aligned the plate using dowels to make sure it was square to the axis, then used a probe to determine zero... occurred to me that perhaps not many have seen the touch probing screen on mach4, quite convenient to use for most circumstances:






modifications made:




Fitted to the machine, for ballscrew alignment the plan is to assemble by the fixed position motor mount here:




Then drive it up to the top with the floating bearing mount screws loosened off, then re-tighten once up there... ensures the screw is lined up to the linear rail at both ends. So far seems to have worked as it's nice and smooth at both ends with no binding.




Now I just need to make the other side

[routercnc]

Looking good.

[Nickhofen]

Looking good.

+1

[Zeeflyboy]

ta!

So nothing exciting, bit of a wash rinse repeat but in mirror image:










And now got both fitted... next up will be the Z-axis I think.






I also thought I'd just put this little video of my current machine munching some aluminium... I think she does a pretty good job for a 6040 type machine. This particular bit I did with a 6mm x 22mm single flute end mill with 2000mm/min, 1.5mm axial engagement and 5mm depth of cut at I believe 19k rpm.

[Edward]

Hi Zeeflyboy,
Very nice speeds for a small router. I only use about 400mm/min with an 8mm endmill and 0.5 radial cut on my milling machine, so I am rather jealous. I'm starting the process of building a router similar to your new one, but with dual screws/pulley on the X instead of your two motors, so I am following your progress.

One thing I noticed, although your finish looks very good, in the area circled in red you have these vertical lines that are kind of similar to what I sometimes get with my milling similar plate thickness. Do you know what it is causing it?

Edward

[routercnc]

Hi Zeeflyboy,
Very nice speeds for a small router. I only use about 400mm/min with an 8mm endmill and 0.5 radial cut on my milling machine, so I am rather jealous. I'm starting the process of building a router similar to your new one, but with dual screws/pulley on the X instead of your two motors, so I am following your progress.

One thing I noticed, although your finish looks very good, in the area circled in red you have these vertical lines that are kind of similar to what I sometimes get with my milling similar plate thickness. Do you know what it is causing it?

Edward

I get similar lines. I've always put it down to insufficient machine stiffness and slight ball screw backlash (~50um typically). Commercial machines which are very stiff and heavy, with low or zero backlash don't have them.

[routercnc]

Good work. It machines aluminium nicely all things considered.

The plates you have just made- any reason they were not a single plate instead of 2 separate plates? I can't remember what the upper structure was going to be but I'm sure it would have benefited from this extra stiffness.