John's Alu Profile build

[Evengravy]

I ended up fitting a pre-ground aluminium tooling plate, self drilling and tapping it as a workplate surface. At the moment I am doing a lot of work with Aluminium so am making other multi-op fixtures that sit on top of this. If I need to work with wood, I simply bolt a sacrificial wood top to this alu plate. I still have some improvements to make here and there but works just fine. I am very glad I wend with quality rails and screws it is very accurate and repeatable. Pretty solid setup, but that could always be better. I'm normally milling at between 1500mm/min and 4000mm/min depending on the end mill in aluminium. I really like the DLC coated end mills for price vs performance ratio but have some 'better' (re: more expensive) YG1 tools for certain situations that call for them. Those are seriously impressive!. Most jobs don't justify the price difference, though. Anyway, here's a picture of the working surface plate with a fixture in the works for a three Op part. I designed some modular Mitee-bite fixtures that come in very handy, too. You can see those in the shot. Sort of like a modular vice idea.





Not sure why the pictures get rotated 90 degree but never-mind, hopefully you can see what's happening okay.

P.S. I don't normally have the spindle extended that far from the spindle clamp, it was just necessary do drop it lower for this job. What I will probably do soon is make another clamp and make a new backing plate to the Z axis to stiffen it up some more at long extensions. Normally my work is much closer to the gantry than it is here. Anyway, works fine for now.

I haven't found the time to address the flood coolant, yet, but the design is such that it would be relativley easy to implement. The tooling I'm using currently doesn't really need it so I may address that if/when I need to work with harder materials. Currently, it's mostly aluminium, some carbon fibre and some wood that goes on here. I have a manual mill for any steel and can do it on here too with the right tooling.

If anyone is wondering, I also got the CNC lathe running on Linuxcnc including the toolchanger. I went with a MESA 7i96 and its a great little machine for the size.