A Cheap But Impressive Hobby CNC Router Machine: Two Trees TTC450 Review

hello folks in this video I'm going to review the TTC 450 CNC router machine from Two Trees this will actually be my first time using a CNC router but as some of you know I am a woodworker and Carpenter by trade and do have experience working with laser engravers and 3D printers so that experience did help speed up the learning curve a bit for the price this machine has a relatively large working volume of 460x 460x 80 mm and comes with either an 80 W 7,000 RPM spindle or a 500 W 12,000 RPM spindle my experience with trim routers told me that I would need the 500 wat spindle to do the type of work that I want to do so I requested it but two Tre sent both spindles anyway it does require a bit of assembly out of the box which took me around a half an hour to finish the specs say that it has a max engraving speed of 800 mm per minute with an accuracy of 01 mm and it can work both wood and plastic but also soft metals like aluminum and copper too the frame and rail seem strong enough for the job but we'll see if they actually are later the frame fastens together simple enough with a few bolts and a rubber leg mounted in each corner but my first and probably most obvious mistake in the rush to get this put together was putting the spoil boards on upside down so the bolt heads were exposed the ya AIS rails are all pre-assembled and just bolt to the frame with a few screws in the front and back then I fastened the xais motor in place before installing the Gantry and z-axis next I installed the limit switches for the X and Y axis and connected the drag chains that carry the wiring harnesses then I fasten the controller in place most of the wiring ends up tucked away inside the left rail guard and extruded Channel this machine has a touchscreen terminal display that allows working offline through the provided TF card without needing to connect directly to a PC but if you prefer to work through a PC then it can be done through a USB cable or a Wi-Fi connection you can see there's a significant difference in size between the 880 W and 500 W spindles the ladder comes with its own bracket to fasten it to the z-axis as well as an external variable speed controller finally I fixed my mistake from earlier and flipped the spoil boards over so the heads of the bolts are below the surface and won't get hit by the bit with everything put together I connected the machine to a power source inserted the TF card and turned it on the home screen displays information about coordinates and your Wi-Fi connection which you can connect to through the tool op at the bottom I don't have Wi-Fi in my workshop or a PC to dedicate to this machine yet so I'll be working solely through the TF card and terminal display the first thing that I wanted to do was test that the XY and z- axis all move and in the right direction then I turned on the spindle to make sure that the variable speed controller worked next I move the spindle to the front left corner of the working area and clicked the XY clear button to zero the X and Y axis then moved it away and click the home button to make sure that it homes back to that same position after everything was confirmed to work I installed a 30° VB in the spindle making sure that more than half of the shank was secured in the Chuck then I clamped a piece of hdp plastic to the spoil boards next I placed the provided Z probe directly under the vbit and on top of the hdp and connected the alligator clip to the VB bit then I click the sculpture button to access the gcode test files that two trees put on the TF card and selected one of them after the control screen opens I click the knife button which causes the Z access to lower the vbit until it barely touches the Z probe so that it can measure its distance from the work piece and zero its position with the z-axis zeroed I move the spindle over the front left corner of the hdp to zero the X and Y axis in that position and then I press the sculpture button again to start [Music] [Music] carving [Music] [Music] [Music] the first file that I tried was just some simple text and the second file was supposed to be a flower but it didn't turn out quite right as you can see the text looks good but the flower looks pretty stringy I used the bit that two trees recommended for the file but I'm not sure it was the right bit for that material so I tried the same file again on a piece of birch plywood which turned out much [Music] better [Music] after having success with the test files I decided to create a custom G-Code to try for that I needed cam software and I chose easel Pro for the job because it seemed to be the most affordable and user friendly with good reviews since I just carved two files I wanted to try cutting next so I imported my Channel logo as an SVG file to carve and cut out of a piece of 3/4 in birch plywood then I set the origin to the front left corner of the material and check the cut settings easel has presets for feed rate plunge rate and depth per pass for different bits of materials in this case I'll be starting with a 11/16 inch two flute and mil bit so I used the presets for that which were 30 in per minute for feed rate 9 in per minute for plunge rate and a depth of 028 in per pass unfortunately it's not yet possible to set different processes up in different layers in eil like you can with laser engraving software like lightburn so I set the total cut depth for this part of the job to 1/4 in and set the shape to outline so the first stage is going to involve cutting the outline of the logo with the 11/16 inch bit to get good detail then I copy pasted the logo into another project file with most of the same settings except I switched to a 1/8 in two flute n Mill bit to clear out the remaining material at a faster rate and finally I made another file to cut a perimeter around the logo clean through the entire thickness of the plywood once everything was set I exported all 3G code files to the TF card and inserted it into the machine then I clamped the plywood in place zeroed the axes and started [Music] cutting [Music] for [Music] [Music] in total it took around 4 hours to finish the setting seemed to work fine but I think I would upt for a/ quar in bit to finish the fill next time time and get it done a little quicker and also use a down cutting bit for the outline all of the bits that I have are up Cutters which causes splintering on the top surface of the workpiece because the cutting action is in an upward Direction that's fine if you want the bottom face to be splinter-free as you can see when I turn the piece around to show the back but I'll need to get some down cutting bits to do this sort of work better in the future next I wanted to try a more complicated 3D carving so I imported a 3D model of a Northern Pipe to carve out of 3/4 in plywood easel generates two separate decodes to do 3D carving in two different stages the first is for rough cutting the bulk of the material with a large bit in this case I'm using a 1/8 in two flute in Mill bit and the second is for finishing which I chose a 30° vbit for I used a feed rate of 30 in per minute and a plunge rate of 9 in per minute for both processes but I chose a 40% step over for roughing and a 7% step over for finishing easel estimated the total processing time to be around 15 [Music] [Applause] hours [Applause] [Music] [Music] he [Music] I think a lower step over for finishing would have removed a lot of these tool marks but it turned out pretty good regardless before I end the video I wanted to try engraving a simple text into aluminum to see if this machine could handle it I set the material parameters in easel chose a 1/8 in two flute and Mill bit and set the feed rate for 5 in per minute the plunge rate for 2 in per minute and the depth per pass at 003 in [Music] [Music] [Applause] ES [Music] [Music] [Music] h I think this turned out great there was some tool chatter starting out but that was cured with a few drops of cutting whe the spindle wasn't overloaded at all and it seemed to make clean straight cuts but ideally I would use a carbide bit for this and probably wouldn't need the oil if I did but the highspeed steel bit worked well enough for this test despite the oil making a mess of the spoil boards so that's it for this video folks like I said at the beginning this was my first time using a CNC router machine so I can't really recommend it with confidence all I can say is that I had a great experience with it and I'm excited to learn more about it and put it to work in the shop if you have any advice or CNC tips that you'd like to share feel free to post them in the comments if you interested in getting this machine then check out the links in the video description thanks for watching and take care

Channel: James Biggar

Views: 558,183

Keywords: cnc router machine, cnc router, cnc machine, two trees, ttc450

Id: HXuWsfpqpjo

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024