Well, that was satisfying.
A case for my Super-PID, and water for my horses!
I finally used the new CNC machine “in anger” and cut out a “real” project. I’d been thrashing around, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t just procrastinating, and after a couple of hours of messing around last night, I decided to “just do it”.
I cut these pieces out of a quarter-sheet of MDF I had lying around (it did the final few parts of the big CNC when I got sick of wasting good hardwood ply), and I really enjoyed being able to unbolt the sheet from the small CNC (where it was hanging off the edge by about a foot), and put it onto the big CNC “sideways” (with the long axis across the table, and the short axis down the table). The new machine is just… big.
I ran the cut at 100ipm, which is a bit more than 3x as fast as the old machine could do. There is still a small amount of tweaking that needs to be done. The edges of the 3 pieces don’t completely line up, but it’s all close enough to be dealt with.
This was the first cut where I attempted to use pocketing to hold accessories in the wall of the cut. I think it turned out pretty well, but I need to remember to oversize everything by the bit diameter.
This was the first time trying the vacuum shoe. It certainly kept a lot of the dust on the table, which is very nice. I’m used to having a large cloud of dust floating everywhere. However, I could use a brush around the cutter, because I got a little rooster-tail of sawdust coming out behind the bit, which ended up spraying dust a bit more than I’d like. getting the vacuum actually sucking up the dust as the cut is in progress would be really nifty — I am still in search of that solution.
The finished part could be a little smoother, and the machine could stand to be tuned and tweaked more, but I’m pretty much ready to start cutting “art” on it.
My CNC “build” TODO list just got a lot shorter, but the “project” TODO list just exploded. 🙂