Moving through the lifetime of diy cnc machining I guess I am like several others and progress further towards a commercial machine. And in all honesty the work progresses to points where we need to think about maximizing flow. I have a few cool projects going at mo.
I am at a stage of manufacturing multiple parts quite often. They are becoming more complex. Alloy. Often these parts will need flipping and turning several times. Ive built jigs and stands to make it easier. What I do find is the forces created are not very forgiving especially even when using endmills as small as 10mm let alone the larger ones.
I am leaning towards building a 4th axis but keep thinking about those lessons I have learned when something has moved in the vice. Not very often, but hey this has happened. Is it worth doing? Like, do I build something that weighs 50-60kg and bolt it to my table with m16 bolts? Using a decent size lathe chuck and a stepper to drive it the necessary rotations to give me that 45/90/180deg turn to continue machining the other sides? Or is it a lot of work and only really worth doing if I use it every day or week? Or do I not worry so much and decrease the endmill size when using a 4th axis. No experience with them. Have built a lot of gear though.
Using Fusion I would be confident the g-code is easy enough to flip the part once its setup with the proper wcs. Dunno. Anyone want to share their own experiences with a good solid 4th axis build? My initial thought was just to build a block to rotate in a vice. This seems like a good idea. B