Hi from Glasgow

[bartdietrich]

Agreed with the ER11 chuck. If you struggle to find a UK supplier then I could throw one in in the post....

Hi Doddy,

Sorry for the delay, got caught up in the 3D-printing-face-shield-frames-for-health-workers thing and then completely forgot about this forum!

Thanks for the offer but I'm not even sure what that picture is of or how I would go about attaching this bit to my setup. It looks quite long anyway, it might not fit between my spindle and the bed. Here's a picture of the business end of my machine with a ruler for scale. It's quite small:

You may find that you have run-out on the spindle motor as well - the biggest problem you're going to face is all the float in the system - from bushes through to the spindle to get the resolution that you need for PCB without smashing end-mills (I prefer the 0.3mm end mills to the v-cutters, but if you look at one of those endmills wrong you'll snap it).

Run-out on the motor is possible although that is about the only thing on the mill that looks and feels like it might be ok. The motor shaft doesn't feel like it has any play and it looks like it's spinning cleanly. Or at least cleanly enough for what I want to use it for. Although obviously that's very difficult to judge by eye. The problem is that there is no way to attach the chuck to the motor shaft in a repeatable centred way: the two grub screws allow all sorts of tilted orientations because the motor shaft is thinner than the inside of the chuck. Do you know of any chucks with some kind of reliable attachment systems?

Also, you say you prefer 0.3mm end mills to v-cutters. I have what was described on eBay as 30 degree 0.3mm end-mills. Because their tip is a V-shape I thought these were V-cutters?

Having wasted the weekend investigating toolchains I'd be interested in hearing what software you're using for this.

Well, I still use what probably most people who have just got into this use: FlatCAM for creating the G-code from Gerbers or drill files and then Universal G-Code Sender to send it to the mill. They're both free software. Can't tell you whether they're any good or how they compare to other software packages. These are the only ones I've ever used! They seem to work well enough although I'm finding the most recent version of FlatCAM to be quite buggy.

EDIT: Having just been over to eBay - plenty in the UK. I'd seriously recommend getting a couple of pillow block bearings and creating your own spindle, driven by belt from the existing spindle motor - then you can manage the runout and end-float easier than inheriting from the motor.

Do you mean plenty of ER11 chuck/collets on eBay? I'll have a look but the ones I've seen so far are all for bigger machines. As for the building my own belt-driven spindle, I'm not sure that can be done while keeping the whole thing to a reasonable size that will fit on my mini-mill!

Bart