Another DIY CNC router, part 5 (laser cut plates lookover, test cuts with MDF mockup)

okay i have all my laser cut plates now and they're looking very nice the laser cut place they would have had about two and a half months of backlog to get through after that lockdown so i was a little bit surprised to be getting my stuff this early but i think because it was a relatively simple job compared to some of the stuff they do i think they might have actually slipped this towards the front of their queue so that was nice so these are all either 10 or 12 millimeter plates and the cuts are very very accurate i was a little bit worried about how these holes would go in fact in my original design these ones right near the edge here i left them as just an etched marking which they've done on some of those other ones oh yeah you can see that there yep so some of them where i wanted to drill myself and if it's on a small piece like this that i can easily get onto my drill press and i want to thread these holes so i want them to be nice and accurate i just let them lift them to be etched like that and i was going to do that with this one here being very close to the edge but i didn't need to bother and i'm kind of glad that i just had that one cut so it will save me trouble because a larger plate like that becomes a little bit trickier to manage on the drill press so this is actually all the plates here except for the the main big one which is still in the car that was kind of heavy um and yeah like i say the sizes are all very accurate one thing about these holes though is that they don't you can't quite get a bolt through so these are a five millimeter hole but there's sort of some um sort of i was going to say fluffy it's not fluffy but it's um the edges are not perfectly uh let's see if i can i can't see my camera screen very well here because it's so sunny and bright but hopefully you can see there that the edge on the bottom edge there on on your screen there as we're looking at it now that's where the laser went in that that seems to be very very smooth and then on the back side it gets a bit rougher and then on this particular one and right in the middle there you can see where the laser went in and out so some of them this is probably one of the biggest bumps actually where the laser went in and out so that's going to be needed bit of sanding but um overall they're not too bad probably the biggest problem that i'm having here is that they all have a tiny tiny little bit of a bend in them and on all but one of these pieces is not going to matter and the one that is it is going to matter on is this one so this is a 10 millimeter plate so it's a lot on the thinner side and it's also very long and skinny and i think that is the reason that we've ended up with quite a bend again i can't see what the hell i'm looking at oh there we go all right so yeah we can we can clearly see that there so that is actually going to be a problem all of the other ones it's not as bad as this at all it's just barely perceptible in the other ones but this one is clear to see and so i'm going to have to sort of bend that back myself but fortunately that's going to be quite easy because it's so skinny um so this is like a rib that reinforces so it has to go through or has to use these bolt holes all along there so it has to be a straight straight line everything else is all right one other slight annoyance that i'm going to have to deal with is that i left an extra millimeter on the heart millimeter and a half on this bit here that i'm going to have to sand off and the reason i did that is because i was worried that the the edge of the cut like the walls would be a little bit sloped like it was on the water jet and i think it is but it's not as much as the water jet not even close so these two bits that i've got standing up here you may can maybe see that this one on the left is standing at pretty much 90 degrees it's not quite but just a tiny tiny little bit of sanding will fix that so that it's standing at 90 degrees this one's not quite so good so that's about as bad as it gets as far as the angle on the walls of the cut actually i think this one was worse if i put it the other way yeah okay that's about as bad as it gets there there you go but i think that's partially due to it has a bit of a bump on it this one okay there's no bump on there but it's definitely not sitting at 90 degrees but it's not as as bad in that respect as the water jet cuts were and because i was worrying about that wall being sloped i actually added an extra millimeter and a half on this bit here because this is quite important to have that perfectly 90 degrees so i was always intending to have to sand this off but if i had known that the side walls wouldn't be that bad i could have only added like a half a millimeter would have been enough i think so i can't really leave the extra millimeter and a half on here because this this piece here this bit here has to match up with there nicely and so for various reasons to make everything fit in i'm going to have to somehow send a millimeter and a half off there but being quite short here um hopefully that won't be too much of a chore so this is what i was saying about these holes they don't they don't quite let a five millimeter bolt go through and there's a tiny bit of play so that's perfectly fine for what i have here actually i think if i hit this with a hammer it probably would go through it's just a little bit catching and it's i think it's where the laser stopped and started there's a there's a tiny bump there it seems on all of them this one over here is six mil goes in quite nicely at some points and then it catches just a tiny bit at others so i think yeah right in the middle there it seems to catch just there oh this one actually slides all the way so they're quite good tolerances actually overall and i think just a oh just a tiny bit of filing on here we'll let it go through there as well um yeah but overall the this the side walls of these holes is probably a little bit better than i was expecting okay here is the main plate and this turned out to be not quite as heavy as i was thinking it might be i can actually pick it up carry it around without too much difficulty just got to watch out for the edges on your fingers there a little bit scary sometimes but yeah this is all done the same i guess i made a bit of a mistake here i made these holes six millimeters for the bolts to go all the way through so that i could use a nut on the back side rather than risking not being able to thread them very well because of the laser cut not being very precise and i'm sort of regretting that now because i was just trimming up some of the five millimeter holes from the other plates and they turned out to be quite a nice fit so what i should have done for these ones i think is make these five millimeters and then drilled a little bit extra and then like i wouldn't have had to put it on the drill press even because i you're just a hand drill just to do that and then tap these so that i get a six millimeter tap um because what i'm going to have to do now is with the belt on the back space is getting a bit tight let me show you so over on the mdf mock-up we have we're gonna have a bolt going in from the top there and then we're gonna have to have a nut here which um there's space to do it although i was just looking at this over here when this bit comes sliding along there's not really much space at all on one side so what i might have to do is counter bore in the bottom and put the bolts through from the bottom either way it's looking like a bit of a hassle so i probably should have just tried to tap those holes instead of having the bolts going all the way through anyway it's done now so i'll just have to deal with it somehow and over here or hang on over here we have some extra holes here which are not for the x rails to go on what they are is actually the same bolt pattern as this piece and the reason i did that was because i wanted to bolt these two side bits on here because this is what the gantry rests on this is like the the main foot or the base of the gantry and if i can bolt that down there and the other one on the other side there that will let me build the gantry up on these plates and it'll all be in the perfect spacing side to side so that when the rails go on and it sits on the rails the gantry will be perfectly the right width another thing i picked up yesterday when i was in auckland is this six millimeter plate this is actually a full sheet of 1200 by 2400 that they cut into quarters for me uh so this is the one that i mentioned on my community page it's like the bullet resistant one that i was asking whether it would be good for machining or not and the general consensus was that it would not be very good and so i had decided not to get it and the guy that i was talking to about it hadn't actually texted me for a couple of days so i thought he'd probably forgotten about it as well so i was just going to let it let it go but then on my way up to pick up the laser cutting stuff he texted me again and he said i could just basically go there that day and it was like a few hundred meters away from the laser cut place so i was like okay it seems convenient enough and the price was all right so i'm about to find out if this is going to be easy to cut i'm going to try and cut a piece off with the jigsaw um it's a little a couple of holes and stuff in it there apparently this was from the australian embassy about 15 years ago so it's uh not only maybe not the ideal thing for machining in the first place but it's also quite old so we'll see i might have just wasted my money here but i only paid 280 um with the cuts and everything so if i can use it for anything at all i think that price is it's not too bad it's about half half the price of of just raw aluminium at the moment oh that's fine that actually seems a little bit softer than some of the other aluminium that i've had it doesn't seem to be particularly difficult difficult to work with like these little bits of um these little spirals that come out they seem to be more tightly packed together than with other other aluminium i drilled at least on the drill press it comes out more in like a string like a not not so tightly packed to get a string a bit more like that oh maybe it's just the speed maybe i was just going slow there that's all it was that's uh doesn't seem to be super hard or anything i was just doing a little bit of jigsawing here that's quite slow but i think that's kind of slow anyway it's a metal blade one with just these tiny little teeth on it does the job but um yeah it's gonna it's gonna take a while to get through there okay i managed to cut that out without too much trouble although i haven't done much jigsawing on metal and there was a bit of trouble because uh my first blade i really screwed it up i was trying to go too fast and i've got all this gunk in there and it seems to be almost impossible to get that out of the blades there so i mean out of the teeth so that blade's pretty much done fortunately i had another one and i just went a little bit slower the next time but yeah it seems to be not too hard to work with so far that's a six millimeter hole that i drilled there was pretty easy so it's kind of funny that all i needed really was two pieces like that because i need to make uh these two two pieces kind of like this from aluminium is all i really needed so i was trying to find i was looking for places that could give me four pieces like that just to have a couple more in case i screwed up so i've ended up with a full sheet i'm not really sure what i'll do with it but if i ever do make a pick and place machine perhaps it'll become handy for that or maybe i actually think i might make a smaller mini cnc again now that i have a larger cnc that i can make it like it will fit entirely the um the small cnc over there can fit entirely inside this space so i'd kind of like to make one of those again but with supported rails and maybe the proper square rails and stuff because i have a brushless gimbal not a gimbal a brushless spindle that i still haven't used yet and i have some more stepper motors like that as well so it's just the ball screws and the rails really that i don't have because now i have a bunch of aluminium that i could probably do something with so that'd be kind of fun but that will be in the future so um until then this funny plate here i don't really know what i'll be doing with it [Music] [Music] oops i was using a four millimeter end mill instead of the fives that i had in the program [Music] [Music] um [Music] hey [Music] well that seemed to work pretty well i mean it like sounded okay and it felt like it was comfortable and it might look pretty good but there's some fairly noticeable ridges in there when you touch it just because the spindle needs to be trimmed properly a lot it's not very good at the moment um but the chips seem to be all right i think i don't know certainly a lot bigger chips and much quicker removal than my small machine was doing [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] ah [Music] so this one again looks pretty good but when you touch it well actually half of this is really nice and smooth the half closest to us so right here it's real it feels really good then over this bit here um just feels slightly rough somehow almost feels like when you touch the mdf you can feel like a grain to it it's not really a grain but this texture there you know and when you touch here there's not like no texture really and then here you've got the mdf kind of feeling so um yeah overall i'm pretty happy with the way things are going so far it looks like this aluminium is going to be no problem at all for machining so i'm glad that i took a gamble on that but it's getting a bit late so i'll finish for today and i'll do some more stuff tomorrow

Channel: iforce2d

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Id: tf_LQUQvbd0

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021