Electronics for New Machine + Chinese Spindle + VFD

**JAZZCNC** · 30-01-2016

Originally Posted by mturneruk

Have you got an automatic tool change system - Is that another ball game ?
Where would i start with that ?

You start by taking out a Mortage and or selling the Wife. Then yes it's all new ball game. Not massively difficult but expensive and will require some coding or Macro writing. This is one of the reasons why UCCNC is restrictive because you can't easily take full control for things like ATC.

Originally Posted by mturneruk

I am pleased with this, but it took me a whole week to make. 9 Hrs + machining.

Looks very nice but 9hrs is nothing for 3D work. I've got people who makes things that take 12-18hrs minimum with Millions lines of code and are only 200x100 rectangles. I cut 6ft sq mural made in 4 pieces for school wall that each piece took 22hrs and ran continous.

As you get more experienced you'll be surprsied how much you can fetch Cycle times down. If your doing 3D jobs it's worth Re-tuning your motors biased towards acceleration rather than velocity. It will bring cycle times down considerably.

**mturneruk** · 30-01-2016

I was increasing my acceleration and velocity as I went along. Bit at a time.
What i noticed was that the Z axis was the limiting factor, so i increased it, and then obviously my job completed faster, but I felt sorry for my machine. Everything was very warm. Spindle, steppers etc.
Not boiling though, but very warm.

Also I only have one 3mm ball nose bit and i didn't want to break it. I roughed with a 6mm ball 2.5mm stepover, 5mm DOC and then finished with a 3mm ball with a step over of 0.75mm.
Forgetting the design I did, what is the optimum tool size / Stepover for this kind of thing?

Something tells me it's better to design something that allows you to use a bigger tool.

**mturneruk** · 30-01-2016

One other thing was that the amount of clean up I had to do was a significant pain in the ass. I wondered if running the spindle faster or slower might reduce that. I tried a range of speeds, but settled on about 15000 as it sounded nice.