Questions on using a moving gantry style mini-mill...

[Davek0974]

More questions, anyone care to put pics up of their whole setup?

I'm looking to find a home for the damn keyboard, monitor and mouse - this lot seems to take up more space than the machine! The keyboard and monitor are also suffering under the shower of chips ;)

[routercnc]

[Davek0974]

Nice, way too clean and tidy ;)

Wall mounted monitor is good, the keyboard and mouse is sort of where mine is but the chips get flung for about a 4 foot radius when cutting so i have to cover the KB up every time i press start!

I need to move it to a better location really but space is tight, or poorly arranged, or both ;)

Too much in one room really, it's 5.2m x 4.2m - CNC plasma, CNC milling, manual milling, pillar drill, lathe, power-coating station and oven, bench, pedestal grinder/buffing, Mig welder and bench, 20T press, bandsaw, metal storage, probably more....

[lucan07]

Mine is not set up yet but Monitor on wall and keyboard mouse just below on swinging shelf or a 14" CRT tv bracket in a former life with a piece of MDF attached swings all ways including back to wall up out of way of chips. I also have the Mill sitting in a 700x700x7mm plastic garland tray from amazon catches lots of chips and fluis if necessary come in all different sizes extremely useful in workshop.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Garland-2251...ilpage_o05_s00

[Davek0974]

As a move in the right direction, i have fitted some bracketry and mounted the monitor up high out of the chip path, the brackets stem from the main table frame which is 44x44 structural aluminium, makes it easy to bolt bits on ;)

I also did a facing cut on the bed, here's a video of a bit of it...
https://youtu.be/PSkSn_s8xF8

It was with a 12mm indexable carbide tool at 21000 rpm and 2300mm/min feed, DOC was 0.15mm, just enough to get a cut off the whole face.

The results show the head is a tiny bit off-tram but until i get a decent setup for adjusting it I think it best left where it is, using a DTI it seems the slight ripples made by the tool are about 0.01mm high at the peak,not bad i think as the head was just as i bolted it on!

All things being equal, the results from now on should be 'as good as it gets' for a while at least.

[Davek0974]

Still running good, much better in fact after doing the facing cut on the bed - i think this should be the first job on any machine as it makes such a difference.

Now have Vectric software which seems pretty good. Does anyone here use it know if there is a way to enter g-code snippets into the job process list??

Things like selecting G5x Offset or adding a pause, message etc ??

[routercnc]

Don't know about inserting g-code using Vectric directly, but you can read the .txt gcode files it creates using a text editor such as 'notepad' and add the lines manually. Or you can load the code into Mach3, then there is a code editing button which opens a text editor which you can then edit.