CNC LATHE?! - Router Add-On!

[Music] I can't know for sure what you were expecting when you clicked on this video but there's no way you're ready for this put on some pants buckle up strap in and hold on your hats I certainly hope you brought your hats things are about to get crazy [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] I realize tensions are high but miraculously I was able to partially recover from that broken drill bit I went in behind it with a carbide end mill managed to get about half the drill out not great but I have to thread diameters in there which should be fine depending on the screw or the bolt size the minimum is usually one and a half diameters it's not really linear like that but close enough for these small sizes so two thread diameters should be fine while I was whittling away at that drill corpse my clone built these other two parts I don't have it on video but nothing really complicated here this is a nose cap the same bolt hole pattern and it goes here we'll get into the details soon enough the other part is a motor flange and it'll be assembled here this was done on the CNC router and if you can see the finish in there I threw in a chamfer too just to give me a little bit more space for a weld bead once assembled there's a step for the nose of the stepper motor and the four screws that hold it on before continuing let's take a step or two back what I'm building here that thing you saw mounted on the router at the start of this video he's a machine spindle well sort of it more accurately be called a compromise spindle a proper machine spindle is one of the more complicated bits of kit you might try to design in a home shop and even harder to actually build big picture this is the spindle body and we'll hold these two bearings the large one is firmly pressed in the front with a spindle cap helping to take some of those machining loads there's a smaller bearing that will float in the back this will be installed further up in the spindle body once that's in there there will be a shaft mounted through those bearings where the Chuck on one end about like that and the stepper motor on the other this will be direct drive and rigidly connected [Music] these are just all bearings not particularly precision your off-the-shelf standard ball bearing this is single row and this is double row now although these can take some axial load they're not ideal for machine spindles now unfortunately a matched set of bearings suitable for a machine spindle would probably cost me more than what it cost me to build my router so those are out of the question here however if we keep in mind what this thing will be doing that'll be used on a CNC router the cutting loads I expect there and the precision a CNC router would offer well I'm hoping these will be a good compromise and if I'm careful with my machining and how I assemble this well I won't talk too soon we'll get this together and then we'll run some tests [Music] there's still a little bit more machining to be done on the spindle housing but for now I'm going to put this aside and I'd like to do some work on the actual shaft again this needs to attach to the Chuck on this end you can see that small I plan to weld an additional piece onto here and then machine at all is one ideally this would all be turned down from one solid piece of I don't know two and a half or three inch stock ideally this would be turned between centers unfortunately I have features on both ends that wouldn't leave those centers in there for very long I mean ideally ideally after machining this would be hardened and ground that's a story for another time machine spindle for the CNC router I'm hoping the collet Chuck should be good enough [Music] part is almost his size I've stopped a bit to let it cool it's almost at room temperature but it was hotter working from hot measurements is a rookie mistake you'll want to avoid as it almost always results in a scrapped part most times it might not matter but if your micrometer is out you'll want to wait for the part to have cooled down I mean especially for precision bearing fits like this a change in only a few tenths could cause them to fall right off now I've also cut some relief between the two bearing seats the large bearing goes up here towards the front and the small bearing is back around there this leaf cuts a bit of a taper it's old has some wear cuts a taper it's not much and usually not a problem but again for bearing fits it could make or break this part cutting in some clearance results in two areas I can address independently there's still a taper there of course but it's over a shorter distance and there are some games I can play to tune those in a bit there's also another groove cut up towards the end this is a gutter for a thread that I'll need to put onto here there's a nut that keeps this whole pack together and sort of pre-loaded I'm gonna wait to do that until I get these bearings in for me personally I've got a much higher chance of screwing up these fits than I do that thread I'm going to do these first get those behind me and move on I'll bring you back that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right I'm so close I can taste it no wait that might be cutting oil so here's the spindly bit this is the part that will be driven by the motor and this is the nut that will pull the bearing pack together it actually goes on the other way I start to drill a couple of holes or milsim flats some way to drive this nut anyway you might have noticed I didn't have any round stock of the right size so I chewed the chuck backplate out of some bar stock in hindsight I should have just karate chopped it around live and learn I guess it has a small register and there are four mounting holes four threaded holes for the bolts that pulled the Chuck onto this funny thing I made it to the size recommended by the Chuck manufacturer or I made it to their numbers but the Chuck doesn't seem to want to elegantly pop on it's really close I mean I'm pretty sure my part is around and as hard as it might be to believe it almost feels like the register recess in the back of this high-quality chuck is maybe a little oval I know when I hand fist it on there just yet but it feels like the screws should be enough to pull it home [Music] you [Music] [Music] it's ready for paint watching from home you might be thinking to yourself jeez I'm sure those weld beads are nicer than they look on video but don't worry they're not I don't know why but I thought I'd go for that cast look it turns out I don't have very good tools for really getting in there to blend everything in so let's talk about what happened as you can see i braised together finished machined parts which usually isn't very smart I mean weldments are fine but you'd usually leave the finish machining to the very end after the part has completely cooled and most likely normalised in a heat treat oven the heat and the clamping and the general manhandling from welding can induce a lot of distortion in parts and by kenan i mean it usually does but you'd want to do is weld up roughly machined parts do all of the welding or fabrication that's involved then it goes back for a finished machining I've never tried this before though in theory the brazing should result in less Distortion on top of that all of my parts are quite beefy the smallest wall section is probably I don't know three eighths of an inch ten millimeters and the worst comes the worse the way this thing is laid out I could come in and potentially correct for example like an out of round where the bearings fit maybe I'm gonna clean this up a little bit more you deal with some primer paint it and then we'll come back and see how the parts fit I'm not exactly sure what color this is I know it's something between a battleship gray and like a British suntan I think that looks pretty sharp if I do say so myself see if everything fits alright I like how that went in there I like how that feels protip if after pressed fitting a bearing it still turns it's a good sign probably be smart to lock tight these since I don't have easy access to them after this thing is fully assembled this spinny bit spent the night and what appears to be a humid freezer now this works that's the first section all right it should be it now let's hope I can drop the bearing in the back this is a spacer that looks about right normally have a good way now to get in there and tighten that nut I'm gonna to sit down and have a talk with the fellow that designed this thing that hole you saw me mill on the side of this by the way is access to these set screws there's two hundred eighty degrees apart that's for clamping on to the motor shaft it's not ideal but it's a D shaft it doesn't have a key would have probably been smarter you get a motor with a key so this could just slip in and be retained by its four screws but as it is this is timed to one of the holes on the four jaw Chuck so once the motors on I can hopefully align it to the flat on the motor shaft bring one down and snug it up with the one behind it anyway let me cobble together something that'll let me put some torque on this nut the four original screws that actually came with the Chuck I just threw away I recommend you do the same I bought some high quality grade 8 bolts the hardware they give you with the chucks I don't know just doesn't give me the warm fuzzies I don't know if it's psychological but they even feel lighter than what a real bolt should feel like I don't know maybe they're dried out toothpaste with some black food coloring the nut on the back by the way I just tapped home with a punch in a small hammer I'm just too excited at this point have too much momentum to slow down and make another tool I want to try this thing out I don't know if you can tell but we're now in the flip side of my bench feels like I'm in someone else's space here the motor is still wired in and it doesn't reach the normal side in all the excitement I neglected to buy the proper fasteners for here and we have to make do with what I got I found some countersunk bolts they're not perfect what's the best I got right now finally mounted to the router table it's been a couple of days and of note I did go out and buy all the right screws mostly because I also didn't have the screws to bolt this thing down with in the excitement I was going to use nails but then stopped took a deep breath and came to my senses as much as I wanted to try this thing out there's only one thing I wanted more for it to not look like my neighbor built it it's on there nice and solid though it isn't really tram din yet meaning I didn't go to the trouble of squaring it with the table or leveling it it should be close but dialing it in is on the to-do list I'm not gonna stand here and make pretend I haven't tried this already I'm not going to dramatically reenact the struggle blow-by-blow but let me walk you through the highlights first there is some eccentricity to my spindle although eccentricity is in style these days it's really not a good look for a machine spindle I'm not exactly 100% sure where it comes from but I have tooth out that's not necessarily a problem because I'm running a 4 jaw Chuck so I can dial the work in but at high speeds that off centeredness is an ideal best I can tell there's no end to play nothing wobbles or moves in and out which is a really good sign and means I can fix this eccentricity on the router itself once I get a bit more confidence with this thing I'll take the Chuck off and recut the back plate cut it in position using the router that should get it running dead true [Music] you [Music] I also made a tool holder or maybe a temporary tool holder as you can see this holds only one tool once I get this figured out my plan is to make a I guess a multi-tool holder like maybe three or four fixed tools on one block I think I can then define fixtures in Mach 4 and cheat my way to an automatic tool changer put another way I could have four of these tools hanging off the mill axis z plate and the entire spindle in part can move to different locations the whole table can move instead of changing tools directly it'd be changing the location of the work which would coincide with a new tool think of it like a parallel universe automatic tool changer instead of the work staying still in the tool changing the tools stay still and the work moves to the tool it needs if I can fit them that is I still have to work all that out I've been playing with this new toy now for a couple of days and perhaps it's become evident in the clips you've seen it's got an issue or two I mean it's great a lot of fun I'm excited about what this adds to the garage but there are a couple of issues first the bird nesting is out of control it's a little bit better with the carbide insert that's in there now with respect to the high speed steel but the Machine needs babysitting [Music] I've tried all the settings I can think of to try to get the chips to break it's just not happening for now I've taken to having the tool retract past the work which gives me a chance to pull any necessary not the smartest move reaching in there while it's running but so far so good I started off with a high speed steel tool this one this is the one you saw probably moments ago mounted in the tool post vertical and cutting on the top so the work was spinning this way and the tool was cutting along the top of the work [Music] when I changed a carbide that's braised carbide I also changed the tool orientation now the high speed steel tool sort of worked but my router isn't as rigid as I'd hoped at least not in this orientation tool post extension plus the link that a tool resulted in a bit of a diving board so I switched to a tangential cutting strategy here the insert is braised on the face of the shank and it's cutting on the back I actually even tried it with the same piece of high speed steel still mounted vertically about like this and it cuts here in the back like at that three o'clock position instead of high noon set up like this tangentially it shifts most of the cutting loads up in the direction of the ball screw the machine acts more rigid if you backed me up into the corner and put a gun to my head I'd probably say it made things about 55 percent better second maybe third I don't remember what number we were up to this motor doesn't have as much oomph as I hoped it would so I've had to reduce the cutting load again from the previous motor video I mentioned this motor was a compromise between holding power and torque at speed as it turns out the cutting load is that compromise I was just hoping for a smidge more power I'm currently running at about six or eight thousand cut depending how I'm feeling and a max of four or five thousands per revolution feed rate anymore and I can stall the motor for a CNC router conversion I don't think that's all that bad for a CNC lathe that'd be pretty terrible on the bright side however I am now running a CNC lathe the router conversion at constant surface speed you may have noticed this spindle speed up or slow down as the diameter changes resulting in a constant load and some spectacular surface finishes I mean the surface finish could still use a little bit of work but for a router I mean spectacular I did need some help from Mach support to get that set up properly those folks have been great not to mention they have the patience of a saint I might seem like a nice guy on the surface but when I start asking questions let's just say I might have pushed the limits of free technical support for now and for the examples you've been seeing I've been using the turning wizards and Mach for Hobby interestingly these aren't available in the industrial version only the Hobby version the fact that they include them at all with the base license is just amazing I'd never used them before of course but they're super handy and pretty easy to whip out g-code once you get a feel for them it has some basic building blocks like basic laid operations you might expect that you could build sequentially one on top of the other to get to a finished part and each operation has refinements you can make to them and the potential combinations of all these basic cycles could probably make 90% of your parts without the need to ever leave Mach for another cam package I mean what I'm doing here is pretty basic but for the kind of parts I make on my manual leaf I could do it all here in the lay the Wizards again you build the part geometry step by step it accumulates here in this list window and then you can post right to the controller a goofy program but hopefully you get the idea I just sort of made up numbers and positions there but you can see now in the graphic display area it's showing the tool paths we just programmed in and I guess three steps in three turn cycles there's a surprising amount of control in there too you can opt to do just the roughing passes or just the finished passes or tweak small offsets to dial your part sizes in now the built-in Wizards won't do any sort of strange undercuts so I couldn't do this super crazy parts I was hoping to demonstrate for that you'd need another cam package like fusion for example to generate the code then bring it back here for cutting now I did try that only briefly maybe it's for the best since I'm only getting started with this thing but it turned out to be a can of worms getting the settings right for Mach 4 and finding the right post processor and tool orientation and just figuring out how it works in fusion to get it to talk properly with Mach 4 but it's only a matter of time I'm sure we'll be digging into the fusion lathe side of things shortly for now though this was a spindle build video and not necessarily a cam lathe video okay again I hope you're sitting down this is reason number two I selected this motor the flip side of the compromise the holding power I'd like to use this setup as an indexing head now I've botched together some simple code that will do three different contour cuts on three of the four sides and the spindle should move away and it should sort of do a little bit of showboating although I fully expect to lose that end mill the experiments must continue [Music] [Music] [Music] Wow I completely expected to break an end mill there I mean it's nothing complicated just a profile on three sides but I didn't think that was gonna work when this thing is powered on and powered on it's got just this little bit of wiggle like any more than that and I have to overpower it but just on its own it's got this little bit of wiggle I don't know between poles or steps and I don't know what I figured with a small carbide end mill that little bit of wiggle would have been enough to snap it okay I think that's it it's been a long three and a half days out here in the garage now I just need to make some calls to see which of the sisters my wife and the kids relocated to but as far as our little experiment is concerned I think I'm off to a good start I still have some tweaking to do in the actual motor settings maybe there's a better set of parameters for this thing to accommodate the split personality I'm asking it to take on I've certainly got my work cut out for me on the cam side of things from the little I've seen so far CNC lathe seems like a totally different world than CNC mill my end game for this ideally and if it's possible is to implement something of a mill turn system on the router so currently to make these parts I either fire mock four up and leave mode and I do the turning or I fire it up in mill mode and well do the milling what I'd like to do is do that on one setup so imagine like a toothed timing pulley for example it'd be nice to throw some stock in here turn it to size then come in and mill the teeth all in one program but as always I'm getting ahead of myself if you stuck around for all of that thanks for watching and next time I think we'll jump into the CNC basics hopefully I can convey that this sort of stuff isn't all that complicated if you think you'd like to get into it yourself

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 1,905,061

Rating: 4.9427934 out of 5

Keywords: cnc lathe, cnc router, constant surface speed, cnc 4th axis, cnc A axis, cnc indexing, Mach3, Mach 3, Mach4, metalworking, tig brazing, lathe, mill

Id: mAZei3wpBe0

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DeepSkull]

Lol... it went something like... “I might seem like a nice guy, but when I’m on the phone with free tech support...”

Let’s just put him and me in the same boat for a sec... I’m pretty sure I’d end up with a lot less editable footage than he does...

[u/juffisakari]

Only 1 axis short of our machine. Well it's probably his too, now that i think about it.

[u/6nf]

not tee bag!