It's begun....

[Washout]

Evening all:

A big milestone tonight, thanks again and as ever to Dean and Jonathan (I would be really struggling without you guys).

Firstly, the talk of slack Alices and tight chuffs had me checking over the machine for loose stuff and I found a couple of bolts that hold the Y Axis ballnut housing to the Z-Axis that needed tightening, so that helped as I think there was some play in the Z-Axis "rolling" about the Z Axis if that makes sense.

I also hooked up a bottle of PC coolant to the airbrush "mister" (will look at something less expensive for the future) and although its a bit vicious compared with a true mist i.e. almost flood I figured too much was better than nothing.

So I ran a roughing job for an aluminium catch in the normal 6082 using 12000rpm and 1200 mm/min and a DoC of 1mm. This ran, but I need to refine my toolpaths or how I'm generating them in Vectric, as the machine romped through the initial slot, but I had neglected to notice the toolpath was using alternate climb and conventional along the Y-Axis.

Whilst there was no mishap like last time, the difference between a conventional path compared to a climb was night and day i.e. the climb milling threw the chips out (and this time the chips looked like nice shiny chips rather than welds :) ). The conventional paths didn't throw the chips as well but the machine grumbled through the material, in fact the "grumbling" was vibrating the whole workbench

I also have some strangeness in the toolpath where some long cuts were stepping along rather than smoothly running and resulted in not so much chatter marks but waves.....weird.

Here's some pics of my first completed run in aluminium - I would have videoed, but I was hovering over the feedhold and e-stop :-) Also bear in mind this is a roughing pass and the "chatters" you can see are where the conventional milling occurred. The gouge you can see at one end of the oval was the "weld" and crap from the previous attempt.

Anyway, I am going to play with the strategies in Vectric to see which one does the most climb milling, as that was just eating through the material with nearly no "noise" at all.

I also have a finishing pass to run on the job shown as well as the other side - I hope the tabs hold up.....

More to come



Chris