Mactec54
looks good ! are you powering the knee to be your z axis ?
The quill will be the main source of motion, but when you compare a large drill in a holder to a smaller end mill, the quill travel gets used up quite fast. The Knee will be used to give me some more room when needed without having to crank the handle. I've read some have driven the knee to be whatever the current tool offset is. Seems like a cool trick, but I could also see it getting me in trouble. The way im looking to do it, I wouldnt do it all the time and then I could be extra cautious when I do require it. Of course if the knee is adjusting to all tool offsets the behavior would become "normal".
Using the knee like that is fine for offset positioning, it also can be used for machining if the feed rate is kept low, for machining to be accurate though you need a Ballscrew in the Jack with a rotating nut, as there is to much backlash in the bevel gears driving it by the crank
Mactec54
Mactec54
Looking for some opinions on this enclosure design. Yes I have not drawn in all the back panels yet, they will be there.
1. how far in should someone have to reach to put a part on the table? I just drew what looks proportional and right.
Attachment 448612
2. Is the enclosure high enough to contain splashes, its 38" above the vice in the position as shown? I am using a 1/2 hp greymills inline coolant pump and have been considering adding another 1/2 hp one made for the sump before a filter. There will be no shortage of coolant!
-I thought about adding a top panel that would mostly seal off the enclosure not sure if it would just make it a moisture trap though.
- current plan is to add some bars to triangulate the top corners back to the tube structure.
Attachment 448614
3. doors not drawn yet (and the opening I show isn't as tall as I want) but I was thinking of having them slide back into the enclosure like the HAAS doors. This way I dont have to have great seals to keep water and chips in. Just have a lip above the door and its track and then have the bottom of the door on the inside of the outer body panel. Doing it this way, I get limited to the opening width to be roughly half the enclosure width so that would be about 3ft wide opening at best. IS THIS WIDE ENOUGH? If I got fancy and made a telescoping set on each side for the doors I could make it wider by maybe a foot or so.
4. How to get heavy objects on the table? With the Haas enclosure it looks like they have the top open when the doors are slid back and a gantry crane could drop parts on the table, I have a gantry crane but wont have room once this machine is installed in its final location to use it for this. I thought about designing in a structure to mount a 1/2 or 1/4 ton hoist to but this is not that easy to do.
- thought about something like a truck crane but larger
I'm guessing this will be a pretty wide enclosure. If you have a long table and a decent range of movement, you'd be able to climb inside and sleep in there. I had a similar concern on my Shizuoka where the table is long enough to lay someone out and it has over 2' of movement. I wanted a high flow rate coolant system and a good air blast nozzle (using a HVLP compressor) without messing up the entire vicinity.
My solution was to have an enclosure over the knee with the table poking out each side through curtains. The curtain opening moved with the Y axis using verticals fitted to the saddle. I used sliders, hinges and polycarbonate panels for the front doors. The framework was fixed to the knee (not the base), as it's a knee mill
I got it 90% completed, then we decided we would be moving house soon (new job), so I put it on hold. Then the virus thing happened. Bottom line is, there is no video (so it never happened...) but it was looking like a workable enclosure that didn't take up all my space.
Slowly but surely I will finish.
very nice Mac !
No Not as yet but may do something once I do a video all the machining of the column was done by it's self with a head mounted on the table and just milled bored, drilled and taped the holes using the CNC control for the X / Y axis and Knee use, the hole is 4.750 Diameter the main plate mounting holes are 1/2" UNC, Drive is 2:1 Poly-V-Belt, I have done some of these Horizontal builds before, but this is a first on a Boss machine most likely the only Bridgeport Boss in the world to have this Mod
Mactec54