Can this 3D printer be a (good) 4-axis CNC?

[Music] last December I got myself an espresso machine and I absolutely love it for it my friends gave me a tamper that they couldn't use because they have like a smaller 57 millimeter machine and mine is a standard 58 but if you're at all familiar with like high-end cycling Parts tune is a brand that is making like super lightweight carbon fiber stuff and this tamper too they're selling for I think like 140 Euros this is way nicer of a temper than I'm ever going to need but like there's no point of not using it but I thought the least I can do is to make them a nice temper that would perfectly fit their machine and while I was at it you know why not also try out the four axis Machining feature on my snapmaker obviously I'm shooting this intro after I've already finished the project and I think this turned out pretty nicely as well this is some nice hardwood that I still had around and Not only was this something that I I'm proud of that I made because this honestly this looks really good but it also taught me a lot about 4X and machining about the cam involved and just about solving problems in general so follow along for this fascinating process right after method from today's sponsor private internet access I like looking out my window it's a nice view there's birds out there the occasional Hedgehog but I don't think I'd want this to be the only window I could ever look out of there's just so much more to see we're traveling in a tinted out sedan can do for your body and mind a VPN can do for your experience online that's one of the reasons I'm using private internet access VPN private internet access hides your IP address and encrypts your internet connection this way it shows your Digital Life from the eyes of your internet service provider Network admins and government sensors Pia now has service in 84 countries in every single U.S state so you can experience it in internet as if you were practically anywhere in the world the client is open source but you can use any of your own openvpn or wireguard compatible clients as well and Pia does of course work with all of your favorite streaming services if you sign up for the two-year plan you'll get a deal at 83 off so it comes out to just over two bucks a month and you'll also get an extra four months for free at this link if you need it they have 24 7 live chat support and you can try them risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee thanks again to private internet access for sponsoring this video first order of business converting the snapmaker from 3D printing to CNC however the laser module that I still have goes right back into the box I'm still not comfortable using that thing [Music] what I can say is that you know even though this stuff is super tiny it does feel quite nice and robust like there's very little backlash in the whole mechanism and it all feels like it's adequate for what we're trying to do here that's the thing about the snack makers they're okay 3D printers they're okay CNC engrave is they're okay laser engravers but going from one mode to the other takes so much work it's just so many little tiny screws to to do and undo it's like 10 minutes just to start a print if you were doing CNC before [Music] [Music] So This Life Center it feels like it's very wobbly and does do a lot for centering but it might be okay as soon as you put some tension on it it loses a bit of its lack we'll see how well this works that's really going to be interesting because even the included sample block I think this is I I forget the name but this is like an expanded sort of foamy sort of plastic sort of material this barely fits like this is at the widest longest setting and yeah I can I can I can't even get this in here without taking off the tail stock but yeah that's what we have to work with and uh next up we've got to make some CAD files to Mill with it [Music] I realized pretty quickly that the software snapmaker gives you called luban really isn't gonna cut it here um it does some very basic High it does some very basic fourth axes uh processing and it might be okay to do like an image engraving on a cylinder or something but once you try to do a real 3D part there's just not enough control you don't get multiple strategies there's no rest Machining it's just super basic so this isn't gonna do it this would be like 30 hours of machine time best case so really the only reasonable thing to do was to set up the machine in Fusion 360 and this took me a while to figure out uh thankfully there are some post-processing files available this looks like it's gonna work I can do full simultaneous four axis I guess 3x is technically Machining I can do planar Machining from each side let's give this a try and see if we can make a quick sample part just to verify that the G-Code works the machine works and we can then move on to the prop material I'm using these single flute coated solid carbide end mills in 3.175 millimeters diameter what a weird size but I've used them before they're super sharp intake Cuts super nicely though good thing I this test cut up in the air because if I had done this at the actual height I would have cut straight to the tail stock all it means is that I zeroed out the work center on the machine to a different position that I had set in cam so quick resume run and we're ready for the first cut foreign [Music] foreign here this Cuts turned out super nicely like it feels super smooth and crisp even though this is like cheap soft but with the single flute cutter this machine did a really impressive job especially considering that this entire setup is pretty wobbly but the fact that the entire control panel is using an unsecured USBC connection and as soon as you slightly wiggle on this the cable comes loose that's a bit of a bummer this is the brains of the machine the you saw me use the panel and do all the controls this is basically an Android 7 phone but also it reads all the data off of the USB drive and then it streams it to the machine's firmware so if this comes loose if this has like a bit of a connection pick up the entire machine stalls and you you saw that message the reconnect did nothing and now I'm gonna have to refine my work zero I hope I can reuse this piece of stock it's just a bit of a pain I don't understand why they're not using the same type of locking connector that they're using literally everywhere else on the machine for the one thing where it's really crucial I don't know I'm going to add a couple zip ties to this hope that it's gonna you know fit in there well enough and then we're just going to retry the entire thing foreign [Music] pass with just a two and a half D adaptive and then the spiral circular continuous pass as sort of a finish pass I did have a third one planned with a ball End Mill but I'm going to skip that I think changing the tool with no two length sensor not optimal not easy enough and I think for the final piece I can make it work with just the single fluid straight End Mill with a bit of a trick and yeah the surface finish on this part especially considering how wobbly this setup is looks really good I think somewhere along the way we lost a millimeter on the y-axis so you know you can see one of the cuts was a bit deeper and it was it was cutting more on one side than the other but for now it's fine however what's not fine is the fact that we are so limited in which portion of the work we can work on so this is the maximum extent that we can get to and I did measure like the distance between where we can do our first real cut and where the tail stock starts is like four and a half centimeters and considering that this is the part we're trying to make this handle right here needs to be roughly that size to fit well that is simply not going to be enough now you can adjust the position of the tail stock I've already took the screws out after this cutting job you can adjust the position of the tail stock and of the b-axis of the rotary axis but this has already at its maximum extent you can only make these closer I tried a couple things I I was trying to see whether I could clamp this tail stock adjusting mechanism on this area here so that this will move back in the clamp that didn't work I could not get this disassembled the other thing I thought was I could remake this plate and just use some Aluminum stock I had and just make a longer version of that in fact the rotor access for the a350 has a longer bed on it so that could totally work as well because really there is no reason that this entire motor and the truck need to be within the working envelope of the router like you're not going to be cutting hopefully you're never going to be cutting uh the rotary axis mechanism itself but then I tried something considered unconventional but that's how I like to roll and that's the fact that we can you know instead of using all four holes we can just use two and we can basically let it hang off the back here and I tried this I screwed it down and really with it hanging off the back like that it's not any noticeably less rigid than with it bolted down with four screws so I think this is just the way I'm gonna try this um it gives us enough space to work with and you know the sticking out the back not a problem at all let's go and prepare some proper wood and size this part to the actual Timbre that we're trying to make [Music] I'm trying to rough out these blanks as close as reasonably possible to round before I put them into the machine not only does this allow me to track them up in the three draw at all but it all saves a ton of Machining time because now we're already much closer to our final part shape okay let's talk about Camp I'm doing all this in Fusion 360 which of course has a huge amount of Cam tools built in the first operation here is some clearancing around the Chuck basically we're Machining waste material but we do need this clearance for later operations I'm using the same 3D adapter strategy here that you would use on a 3x's machine but I'm using four of them and I'm rotating the stock 90 degrees between each pass with rest Machining [Music] then I'm doing the exact same thing again but around the actual part this time former passes of 3D adaptive but this time with some stock to leave so we can have some material to remove in the actual finish passes foreign [Music] ment happening here which is almost impossible to avoid on this machine this means there are ridges between the individual passes where one side cuts a bit deeper than the other but that's what finish pests are for I'm actually doing two finish passes here a first one with a bit of stock to leave just to equalize the amount of material that the Finish past the actual finish pass is going to remove foreign with a more even amount of material to remove the cutting pressure is more even which means we get a more even surface finish in the end for this I'm using Fusion's rotary tool path with the spiral generation option I've also got the tool offset to the side of it so we're more cutting with the sides of the tool and not with the end which typically makes for a better surface finish but I did learn that I should have used line here which with the specific end mills that I'm using makes for a much cleaner surface it almost needs no sanding as is I ended up with a couple fuzzies but those were easy enough to send Away by hand [Music] I still needed to turn down the tamper base to the correct 57.1 millimeters to fit my body's espresso machine so I grabbed some scrap made a quick mandrel and laid down the functional surfaces of the base this stainless actually cut beautifully and with these printed adapters it was super easy to Chuck up our finished pipe in the lathe as well where I then parted off the base and drilled and tapped frame 10 to attach the actual stainless steel tamper base a couple of coats of food safe hard oil and here it is uh you can kind of see the scene between the two boards I know that could have been nicer and I could also have done a lot more design wise I could have hollowed out the inside or done some some scales or anything really this is a full 3d workflow but most of all this thing needs to fit well in the hand and it does that and it does so while looking honestly very nice I think but of course we've also got to talk about the rotary setup on the snapmaker and yes it did ultimately work it did produce a part it's not very good on tolerances and if you look at the setup like you can tell this is not meant to be a four axis machine but I've got to give credit where credit is due this rotary axis itself is actually very nice this has a harmonic Drive knockoff I guess in it there's almost no backlash this thing is solid and it did work with no additional ill effects extended all the way to the back this tail stock however is worse than I thought it was there's also no real way to align the bit with the axes so you can kind of use the tip of the tail stock which welves around five millimeter and then for the x-axis left to right you're supposed to use the stock itself but that's in a three drawing a three jar by definition doesn't Chuck up your stock perfectly on Center so that's going to be off by half a millimeter and then where first of all I guess there is no way to align the rotary axis with the y-axis movement so that might be like on a taper as well this setup is not going to give you mechanically accurate parts and if you try like you're going to have a hell of a time but for pi so just need to look okay this can work um nothing about this is solid in fact you could see the bed wobbling back and forth by a huge amount every time the cutter plunged in but like I said you can kind of work around it but like if I were to choose a 4x's Milling setup this probably wouldn't be it all right let's get this over to my buddies and see if it actually fits in the machine foreign [Music] yeah I couldn't resist then I made another one with a little extra four excessivity this is the second attempt I broke the first one but I think overall it turned out really nicely with all the stuff I learned along the way but that's it for this one thanks for watching keep on making and I'll see you in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Thomas Sanladerer

Views: 66,519

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Id: CmRiChz58rc

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023