I had another productive night on the CNC build.
I measured and drilled 4 decently complicated parts. Luckily, they came as two sets of pairs, so I only had to drill one set of holes on each. I have a feeling that there will be a lot of paired parts in this build.
I started with the X-table feet. Eight 1/4″ holes each (6 to attach to the table, 2 to attach to the motor mounts), plus a very nifty 3/4″ through with 1-1/8″ counterbore. Setting up to do the counterbore on the second piece was interesting; flip the part, then put the 3/4″ bit back in to get it lined back up (with the drill off), then clamp the piece down, swap bits, and voila, a perfectly centered counterbore. Nice.
With the X-table feet out of the way, I’m essentially done with the X-axis for now. There is a little more drilling on the table itself, but I am holding off. More on that in a bit.
I moved on to the Y-axis. Generally speaking, Y is probably the most complex axis as far as being large enough to be heavy, so needing lots of bolts to hold it together, so there are several large parts that have just a ton of holes in them.
The first pieces to be done are the Y-Gantry sides. These are the big vertical pieces on the sides of the machine, and they are mirror images of each other. There are sixteen (yes, 16) 1/4″ holes in each gantry side; 5 to attach to the Y-axis rail, 3 to attach to the gantry bottom, 6 to hold down the BRA, and 2 for the motor mount. It occurs to me that one of the sides won’t have a motor mount. OTOH, maybe I will decide I want to switch sides for some reason. I’ll have motor mount holes ready to go if I need them.
I spent a lot of time on the drill press today. I am beginning to understand why people have a lot of clamps. I really could use some small, maybe 3″ or 6″ clamps, because there is a lot of wrestling with the clamps to keep stuff from moving around, yet not hitting the drill bed. sigh.
The four pieces look really awesome. I am really hitting my stride I think with being able to get everything kind of accurate. As the axes get smaller, the pieces get smaller, and the tolerances get tighter. I’m hoping that I’m getting everything accurate enough.
Which brings me to my next point, and the reason for the title of this post.
The next 2 pieces that need to get cut are the two that attach to the gantry sides. But the *length* of those pieces depends entirely upon how wide the final X-table is. And since I have no way to check that until the hardware gets here. I need cross dowels before I can attach the feet or rail to the X-table, and I need a Bearing Rail Assembly (BRA) before I can see how far apart the gantry sides will be. Both of those things are in the hardware kit that I ordered on Monday, but didn’t get shipped until Wednesday afternoon when I complained. They were sent Wednesday night (I didn’t get the ship notice until Thursday) USPS Priority. If I am lucky, the kit will be in tomorrow’s mail, and this post will have been premature.
But if the kit is not in tomorrow’s mail, I have to wait to cut anything else until it gets here. I am going to start poring over the book, to see if there are any parts “downstream” of here that don’t depend upon those custom measurements (there’s another set of custom measurements coming up, too). And I can chamfer the rest of the X-table and also the Y-rail (and maybe even the Z-rail, who knows?), and drill the rest of the holes in the X-table. I can keep myself in “busy work” for the weekend. But if the gear shows up, I can make a lot of progress, since I can bolt things together and start confirming that I’m doing the cuts and drills right.
Really good progress tonight. I just hope I can keep it up tomorrow.
On the immediate todo list:
X:
– drill holes in the X-table for the feet
– drill holes in the X-table for the rails
– cut the rails, drill holes in each end
– chamfer the other 3 edges
Y:
– chamfer the rail
– I guess I can pre-emptively drill one end of the gantry bottom and Y-rail, waiting for the measurements on the other end.
– decide whether I can clamp the Y-rail reinforcement
Other:
– see if there are any non-dependent pieces that can be worked on
– vacuum up the dust in the garage. It’s starting to get a little intense.