[the_canuck]

Found a house finally! Offer was accepted last night.

The new 'compound' has tons of space and best of all a huge heated workshop! 8 car garage 2 wide 4 deep. I've moved out of my rented 175 sq ft. rented shop. Had to 'widen' the door a bit to get the beast out. I decided against taking it apart and sacrificed the wall instead.

Can't wait to setup an awesome shop with tons of room for all my toys and tools.

Andrew

[Arbo]

All good and congrats.

[the_canuck]

It's less than a week and I close on a new place with a large heated shop. Machine is going to have a new home.

Starting to plan the layout of the shop which is fun but packing is not.

Andrew

[the_canuck]

Moved into my new shop today. Lots more space. Its a good thing considering all the junk I've got. Machine move will come later this week or next.

[the_canuck]

Machine now in it's final resting place in the new shop.

Over the weekend I wired the shop for 240 and got everything ready to go for when my new single phase VFD arrives.

Almost ready to make chips again.

[CarveOne]

There's nothing like getting a bigger shop. Until you fill it up and need another bigger shop ...

[the_canuck]

I have 2 other buildings for the shop overflow once it fills up.

[CarveOne]

Ok, there's nothing like already having excessive expansion capacity.

[the_canuck]

The beast is finally online again.

I had to wire the new shop for the machine and then buy another VFD setup to run on 1 phase vs the 3 phase one I already had.

I'm now in the process of drawing up some molds and hopefully will be making chips next week. I have a trade show coming up in May and hope to have some proto molds to show off at the show.

Andrew

[Jkountz]

Do post some more of those molds when you get them made, Id like to see those!!

[the_canuck]

Spent the weekend at the Denver mini maker faire. I had a booth showing off some molds I made on the machine. I met quite a few cnczone users. Apparently my machine is more famous than I am. I had several people recognise the machine from this build thread.

I'll post some mold details later.

Andrew

[the_canuck]

Upgraded my belt reduction setup on the x-axis from 2:1 to 3.2:1. Should make it easier to tune the servos as I was having issues with a velocity oscillation at constant x-axis movements.

Andrew

[the_canuck]

It's been a while since I posted here. I've been busy all summer with my new old house repair jobs and haven't had much time to make things with the machine. I am slowly getting the shop setup.

The last 3 day I did get one job done.

I needed a new carbon wing joiner for my well used RC F3F Slope racer. I had a hard landing last year at 11,000 ASL flying in 40+mph winds on a 4,000 foot mountain slope. Long store short I broke the 14" x 0.5" x 2" hollow carbon joiner again!

Time to make a mold and save some cash in the long term.

I broke out some left over Mic6 cast plate and carved out a female mold.

I did the roughing passes at 15Krpm, 150ipm with a carbide 2f 0.25" end mill taking about 0.020" per pass. Finishing passes were done with 0.25" ball mill carbide. Final refinishing was done with a 1/8" ball mill to clean up the inner pocket corners.

The machine did pretty well. I had some minor chatter with a longer end mill. I switched over to a stub one and the chatter went away.

Lots of pictures on my Facebook - Canuck Engineering page: https://www.facebook.com/Canuck.Engineer

Andrew

[the_canuck]

First joiner out of the mold. Looks to be almost perfect. I'll have to flight test to know for sure. It fits well.

[Arbo]

Saw that on FB, looks great, and seems the machine does aluminum quite well.

[the_canuck]

Splitting hairs this afternoon.

I upped the step rate per inch on the x and y axis of my CNC to over 10,000 ( or 0.0001"/step) and am still able to hit min. rapids of 1,000 ipm. I still have lots of headroom if I want to up the data rates and steps/inch even higher. I'm seeing much better positional accuracy as the servo loops have more data to work with.

I'm getting ready to cut some very expensive RenShape material for a customer for some master plugs for production molds of a big composite project. This will be the biggest test to date for the machine.

Andrew

[the_canuck]

First time cutting RenShape 460.

So far so good. I hope I don't mess it up as this stuff is pretty pricy. Customer supplied the material so I'm being extra careful.

[Jason Marsha]

Good luck. I know that feeling of expensive customer supplied material.

If you set your machine using a home switch then you can restart at the same point if you get a power loss.

I had the power fail on me for the first time in years recently while using customer supplied material but luckily in this case the material was plywood.

The machine I was using at the time did not have limit switches but I had a standard start point and after realignment the cut was almost perfect.


Jason

[the_canuck]

I've now cut several parts from Renshape and I really like the material. I've pushed cutting speeds as high as 450 ipm. It's nice stuff.

Andrew

[mactec54]

the_canuck

That moving very well, there would not be too many able to run at that speed cutting reliably, you must have your Dmm servo system setup very well