New CNC Mill on the horizon

[fvfdrums]

Long day in the shop today, but very successful thankfully.

Started out making up a block to machine the front plates on, my combination mill and lathe has one real flaw and that is the spindle working ant any major extension and it becomes very inaccurate so I needed to find a way of building the bed up. So I bolted together a bunch of 20mm aluminium plates and surfaced the whole thing and it worked perfectly, somewhere I could clamp the pieces down safely and solid in order to machine the surfaces near the top of the mill.

I machined up the top and bottom bearing plates first and faced the edge that was going to meet the y axis front plate (as the standard plate saw sits from the supplier seem to have a draft angle of about 1 degree) and then it was onto the main plate which I stepped to fit the top and bottom plate by 5mm.

A few holes and it was all together very nicely, its quite nice making the plates to "fit" the machine thats in front of you rather than having it all made up in kit form I can now see the benefits.

So all in all a very successful day, y axis slides left to right very smoothly with no tight spots whatsoever all dialled in with a DTI.

I have mocked up the z axis so still need to do some machining on the front plate of the Y for the ballscrew and surfacing for the bearings but with this new mill setup this should be a breeze! (won't speak too soon)