More Cnc Router Adventures

[Music] and welcome back a few weeks ago i promised you more content on the cnc router and here we go i have some minor topics and also a project to show you i had to make a bunch of frames out of aluminium for seven inch touch displays that go into medical peristaltic pumps so the coolant i'm running in the fogbuster mql is pure isopropane alcohol i'm doing this because i had very good experience with the with the same uh coolant on datron machines that drum machines uh you can look them up on ebay there on youtube there are famers for being very fast router style machines and forever they used isopropyl and alcohol as a coolant because it it prevents chip welding it it gives a little bit of lubrication because any any liquid does even water is lubricating and it flashes off very quickly means you end up with a clean and sterile part and clean dry chips these are these are some of the chips from from recently and as you can see they're bone dry this is a 5083 aluminium which i had to mill with cooling because it's quite soft and as you can see the chips are dry and clean so perfect for recycling and also it makes cleaning the machine and the part very easy because you can just dust it off with a dry brush or blow them away with compressed air this stuff during 2020 it was a bit hard to get pure isopropyl alcohol for obvious reasons but now the the supply has evened out and you can buy it readily available i get this stuff on ebay and five liter buckets and i'm just here topping off the the container yeah i'm not filling it completely i'm leaving some gap for air above the the liquid and i have the the fog buster itself mounted to the gantry of the machine because i wanted the container to be about the height of the nozzle that's also the recommendation by that by the manufacturer that helps consistency in feeding the liquid the the container when in use is pressurized and the pressure the air pressure on top of the liquid will push the liquid through this hose through through the drag chain sort of z-axis to the fog buster itself so it's not a self-feeding system like a noga mini cool which are reasonably reliable at best this as a forced system works more reliable it still has issues because pressure regulators at low pressure are a little bit sketchy you would have to cascade multiple pressure regulators behind each other to get a very good result uh i have a single pressure regulator and i keep this container at about one bar one bar of pressure you do you have to do the conversation into uh non-standard units yourself so there is one hose coming out here that's barely passed through that's air and the other one here is liquid that's pushed up from the container through the nozzle let's see how this uh how the the fog buster sprays so let's turn it on i have it integrated in the cnc controller am 07 command turns it on so we're already spraying but this is a little bit too much so we're going to turn it back this way elf up here regulates the the liquid stroop okay you saw that there is always a little bit of a wet spot from the alcohol hitting my finger and that's the setting i like that's very little throughput through the fog buster but still enough not to starve the tool at the cutting edge you can increase the throughput a little bit when you do drilling or heavy milling but usually that's enough because i'm using a router uh not just for machining plate like doing cutouts in plaque stock i'm using them like a regular milling machine doing all sorts of operations uh most of the time in vices i need a way to locate my my x y zero for machining uh on a on a vmc you would have a renishaw 3d probe or any other means of of probing or on a manual mill you're using an edge finder or a dti and the same principles apply to a cnc router of course in this case my spindle can go slow enough to run a edge finder i can run it at a thousand rpm and that's slow enough for this small six millimeter diameter edge finder so i can locate my position to get my x y zero uh an alternative is of course a dial test indicator i use this primarily to center on boards but also to to find edges and center stock these are more or less jig bore practices using a dial test indicator to center on on parts takes a little bit practice but it's not really uh slow and it's very precise but to be honest matchfinder is darn good and again this is just a cnc router i'm not doing any jig board precision work on this machine i can run it as a thousand rpm and then i can edge find as usual using the pendant now we can take this out to hold the edge finder i'm not tightening down the collet nut like crazy it usually is good enough to tighten it down just by hand holding it like this and tightening it down just so it's snug in the spindle now we do our collar change one thing about er collets not only the taper needs to be clean but also the collet nut because it has a taper on its own in here this taper down here this is what locates the front of the collet that's important to keep clean too same goes for the collet blow them off drop them in the ultrasonic cleaner just keep them clean and by the way if you look down in there in the cold nut you notice that there is a ring and this ring is eccentric this is on purpose don't machine the ring the eccentric ring out of this knot this is here to allow the collet to snap in and be removed 1.5 millimeter end mill necked down for eight millimeter depth of cut and we're good to go okay let's have the machine measure the length of the tool [Music] that's the touch probe it doesn't have a tactile switch on the inside it has a inductive sensor here which is set up in a normal closed configuration means when you you press down on it it opens it opens the circuit and the control knows the length of the tool normally open is normally closed so it's an open opening switch it's important to make it fail proof against cable breakage if if the cable what was breaking broken now uh and i tried to measure the length of the tool it would right away say uh there is something wrong because the z-axis didn't even move same principle as with emergency emergency stop those are always opening switches normally closed because when you have a broken cable the machine e-stops right away without hitting the e-stop if you have a normally open means a closing switch as an e-stop you have a broken cable the machine doesn't notice and then you hit the e-stop and the cable is still broken nothing happens so that's the reason why using normally closed for such applications a quick look at my frequently used tool board i had something like this always at work when i used to run cnc machines when i ran the datron cc i had a very similar board with the most used tool holding equipment some some tooling lying animals and some miscellaneous angel stuff so let's take a look at it what it what way what i usually like to have at hand on a machine i like to have my most used collets in the case of this machine because it's a call-it spindle these are faryon precision type co er25 collets three four six eight 12 and 16 millimeters i also have a er 11 collet chuck with a straight shank this goes in in a 12 millimeter collet and i use this for very small tooling because i have collets from 0.5 up to 7 millimeters here in 0.5 millimeter increments i use this for small tooling and uneven diameter like drills have a set of tabs and the tab drill here uh m3 to m6 2.5 3 3 4 2 and 5 millimeter a small tab holder these holes are for counter sinks these holes are for counter sinks currently there's only one here taper wiper spindle spindle wiper for the er25 spindle three millimeter shanked end mills four millimeter shank um five millimeter shank which are a little bit rare a lot of six millimeter shank uh holes eight millimeter and ten also i have my edge finder here six millimeter edge finder and my noga uh miniature indicator holder of a six millimeter shank that can go in a collet um i'm not a big fan of using these i'm going to make me one of my indicator holders that i also have on the manual mill this thing has too many degrees of freedom way too many uh this is ridiculous to be used on a mill and a saw blade this is to part off finished parts works quite well need to make a better shank this one had a little bit of enemy contact and currently there is a triangular stone sitting here so that's all the tooling that i constantly need apart from the wrenches for the spindle of course very new end mills keep their protective cover on top and once they're used or well used they just go in this board end mills that stick in the sport are usually considered used at least lightly used new end mills always stay in their manufacturer packaging like this one i just got in an order of gearing end mills and these stay in their packaging until i use them and once i have used them they go in a board like this either in this one or down in the basement shop on the manual machine the tabs of course are the machine cannot tap but on a regular basis i need holes for fixturing in a base plate in a fixture plate and sometimes it's just the quickest to use a cordless drill drill the hole and tap it with the cordless drill instead of milling milling or drilling a hole and then thread milling it so that's sometimes very fast way of working that's the clear benefit of having a ground level shop at least some kind of a decent view over the surrounding area not like just a bunker window from the basement this is the the window that's oriented towards the village that's quite nice one question that comes up frequently is can this router cut steel and the answer is as usual it depends generally i would say no it's not made to cut steel but you can make it cut steel here for example i'm cutting i'm helical interpolating two holes in 316 stainless steel which works perfectly fine also i did some contour work on the same part with a four million bullnose end mill and some under cutting and contour boring with a four millimeter lollipop cutter do an undercut three undercut in in the bore and that worked perfectly fine but i would say four millimeter is the upper limit of an end mill that's really usable on this machine in steel okay that's one part with first side finished let's let's pull this off the fixture and i will show you how these are these are made first side fixturing is basically only these four screws so here's the first part with the center section here tapped out i will cut these tabs with with a rotary tool a small kind of wheel so all this material here in the center is not lost not not transferred into chips and still usable and also it reduces cycle time of course and it makes fixturing very easy i ordered aluminium cut cut to size pieces which are about one millimeter in each direction larger than the finished product thickness is already done this is a precision aluminium plate and on the manual mill that i drew on the manual mill i drilled these four holes in a pattern and i have a small fixture plate here bolted to the table of the mill which i drilled and tapped with the same pattern and these screw holes are close enough dimensioned in diameter so i don't need any further alignment put the four screws in tighten them down work piece zero is center of stock center of stock and top side of stock this is a very feasible in this case because the precision ground the precision plate here the aluminium plate it's very consistent thickness the first tool is a six millimeter three fluid carbide end mill which will do the majority of the roughing and material removal and also finish the od this is a guring rf-100 aluminium roughing finishing hpc tool these run quite well and are not stupid expensive the tool comes down to the probe and gets checked for length and now we approach the work first we contour the outside of the part with about one millimeter depth of cut multiple step downs followed by a finishing pass at full depth and 0.1 moon the step over roughing out the large pockets around the center piece relatively shallow depth of cut but high feet and now we cut the deep pockets to make room for the electronics this is an adaptive tool path which keeps the side engagement always the same and it's very effective on light duty machines like this it does a helical interpolation down to depth and then it's it's just shaving away the material with about i think 0.25 millimeters side engagement this produces a very good chip that that gets blown away by the mql system and is not too hard on the machine now we change to a 1.5 millimeter three flute carbide end mill i'm doing all the finishing with a two millimeter three flute cover i don't know because i need the small corner radius i could also program it just to pick out the corners but in this case i prefer to do the whole finishing with the small end mill this takes its sweet time but as i said before it's a cnc machine that runs unattended so not a big deal when i say that that means that i can do while the machine is running i can make other parts on my manual machines it's also finishing the floor surface here and you can see the trailing spot of the mql where the alcohol is flashing off behind the end mill same antenna also drills or helical bores the holes that get later taps or stay just straight boards the last tool we're running is a four millimeter two flute carbide end mill with a 0.3 millimeter corner radius i need the corner radius to machine the large chamfer around the part here i could also use a large chamfer mill but that would mean one more tool change and that way i can get away with three tool changes and have the machine run on its own most of the time apart from the manual tool changes of course but that's fine four millimeter bullnose end mill 0.3 millimeter corner radius and i'm stepping down 0.07 millimeters each pass to create this chamfer this gives a quite nice finish and this is pretty much the only real thing that's later visible so i'm taking my sweet time to get this chamfer right okay we're back in the basement shop and as you can see the parts came out pretty nice from up first or up one so let's do some detailing cut the tabs here and what i found two works excellent i've seen people use knifex wire cutters or something like that to cut the tabs but you're always in danger of damaging the the part next to the tab so we don't do that uh what i found best is a rotary tool with a cut off or a cut-off disc aluminium and the cut-off discs of course is a little bit tricky but a piece of candle candle wax so that works beautifully it's relatively fast very very controllable so no danger of damaging the actual part next will be to make a fixture to hold these parts for the back side this is the fixture i came up with to hold the parts for the second side it's just an old aluminum plate that was used as a super glue fixture and i cut on the manual mill the internal dimension of the part as a recess all the way around also i relieve this area here you can see there is a little bit of a step like 0.5 millimeters that is relieved so i don't have this huge contact area and when we take apart like this it slips right over here it's located by by the the square boss that we left then we have three m3 screws that hold then we have four m3 screws that hold the part to the fixture and allowed me to do my fixturing and i can do and i can take my offset my work work offset from either the fixture or the first part that i put on it depends how i do the cam i found when i make location fixtures like this for rather imprecise work it's good to add a little bit of error wiggle error otherwise you're fighting the parts on the fixture all the time and that's about as little fun as it gets i gave the x y of this locating boss here square locating boss this is about 50 microns smaller than the actual measurement on the part so so it goes on nicely trust me if you have a fixture that you're fighting you're going crazy and the same setup i'm going to clean up the tabs using an end mill so no need for manual rework here i can just run a small end middle along here and clean all the tabs off and these two holes here these are 100 millimeter part these fit the 50 millimeter grid pattern on my cnc router table side machining i'm doing the second side completely with one end node because i i don't want to do the two change um this is a two millimeter three fluid covered end mill i'm adaptive clearing away this large step on the outside this is not the most effective way to do this with a six movement antenna this would take probably half the time but that would mean that i have to babysit the machine all the time so that's why i run the smaller tool in exchange for a tool change and i can do everything with the same tool here i'm cutting a groove for an o-ring i'm just helical stepping down with the two millimeter end mill to create the slot and the last step is to clean up the area where we cut the tabs with the cutoff wheel that's my setup to power tap the holes in the frames with a m3 tap i have my two vices and i propped up some one two three blocks and a stripper plate that stops apart from getting pulled up if i get a little bit careless and this setup allows me to do all four holes just by turning and flipping the part around you can see that that goes quite fast and the tapmating is a very safe way to do this takes maybe 40 40 seconds to a minute per part that's a bucket of chips unfortunately these especially the adaptive clearing chips are very very light and take a lot of space so this whole bucket of chips is like two kilograms and the scrap value of aluminium is not so much yeah but i'm still going to move it to the recycler and not just dump it the finished frames after some scotch brite work deburring a very light etch break with the scotch brite and ready for anodize 25 frames first batch we will make another 25. we decided to split the order up in two otherwise uh it gets a little bit convoluted i have other work to do too i need the cnc router for more than one project and here is the frame after anodize with the seven inch raspberry pi panel touch panel installed with the ui programmed and here's the back side you can see that through the threaded holes there are four screws sticking out those are used to mount the whole assembly in the peristaltic pump machine and the four other holes where you can see the screw head that's holding the raspberry pi display in place i hope you enjoyed this mix off of this rather weird mix of topics on cnc router thanks for the ongoing support thank you all for watching and i'll be back for sure you

Channel: Stefan Gotteswinter

Views: 39,851

Rating: 4.9678588 out of 5

Keywords: cnc router, sorotec, fräsen, cnc fräsmaschine, aluline, alu-line, cnc mill, bobcad, bobcam, portalfräsmaschine

Id: _fPTYjScd_w

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021