Hi!

Got my mill on Tuesday, managed to get it up and running on Wednesday. The posts here were very informative but I thought I would add some things which might be useful if you are a complete beginner using cnc mills (like I am, was).

First the setup of the hardware went very smooth, had to use mild violence to get one of the windows to fit (I thin the correct term is a rubber mallet).

What might not be apparent is that the GbrPnl program or maybe the MicroMill itself buffers commands.I tried jogging the MicroMill and nothing happened (the door was open) but when I closed it all commands executed and the drill bit narrowly missed the bottom plate. Lesson learned: Let one command execute completely.

I then made two test runs with Easel and since I had not secured the drilling bit enough it crept down until the MicrolMill couldnät move it anymore and drilled straight through the wasteboard. No harm done since I turned it off asap and no pressure was aspplied in Z-axis. After two runs ending like this I realised what was wrong and secured it with pliers. Lesson learned: Tighten the drill bit.

Then I mismatched the height to the material and it didn't cut all the way through. Lesson learned, do not chicken out when setting the Z height.

Then the wasteboard lost grip of the bottom plate because I removed it and reattached it without reapplying the doublesided tape. Lesson learned: Always reapply tape when you have removed the wasteboard from the bottom plate.

Then I set the Z height a bit to much into the material and the whole operation grind to a halt since the current settings didn't allow the MicroMill to cut more than 1 mm of the material. Lesson learned: Setting the height is REALLY important!

Finally I got the whole thing to work as intended and small moustache was produced


All in all I am very happy with the whole thing and hopefully someone else can learn from my mistakes.

Also I have noticed that the Z-axis motor produces som strange sounds when running so I guess I need to remove it and tighten the srews.