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Although I've had everything in house for several weeks, my day job has been keeping me out of the shop. Yesterday I finally had a day to work on the machine and managed to make my first parts. I'm still waiting on my spindle so I made a quick and dirty (with the emphasis on the dirty) spindle mount for my laminate trimmer. You can see in the pic that I had to run a wire to it so that the tool probe would work. The part is just a test thingy I made to try out the machine.

Overall, I'm absolutely thrilled. I'm amazed at how smooth the surfaces are right off the machine. There's one chip in the upper part of the spiral but heck, it's just a chunk of pine so I'm not too bummed out. Speeds were set at 150ipm but I don't think it ever got that fast and was mostly at around 120. I ran the part again and upped the speed to about 150% and it came out just as good.

As I was assembling the machine, I was worried that the X and Y axis might be out of square because as I was measuring things with my tri-square, the laws of geometry were being violated - nothing was adding up. So, once the trimmer was mounted, I used the jog buttons to cut along the side of a chunk of 2x4 moving only the X and then only the Y - when I checked with my square, it was perfect! Phew!

Anyhow, I'm really amazed with this machine and glad I went with it. My to do list consists of:

Add limit switches - hall effect in my case. I'm using the pre-made ones from digi-key and I'm going to try to use one sensor, two magnets per axis. The sensors will be wired in parallel so I'll eat up only one input on my Gecko

Bench - I'm going to make a stand out of unistrut for this beast, Hoping it will go together easily

Spindle - I've got a 2kW teknomotor on the way so once that arrives I've got to mount it and run a 220 line to the bench. Speaking of spindles, the mounting pattern for the Z-axis is about the only criticism I have with the machine - the way the bolt holes line up, you either lose a 1/2" of clearance under the gantry from the axis sticking down or, the Z-axis can be mounted such that it's about an inch higher than the bottom of the gantry. Not that big a deal as I can just drill new mounting holes but George really should fix that. I'll wait until I get my spindle before I start doing things like that just to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Design!!! - That's what I'm lagging on right now are the CAD models of my parts though it's coming along!

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

Nice! Congrats! How did you generate the code for that spiral? My CAD/CAM software won't do that, that I'm aware of.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

Nice! Good to see you're getting up and running Andy. I'm about to run my first parts too....not sure what they will be yet. Keep going!!

Cheers,
Dave F.

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Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"

I drew the spiral up in Solidworks. You can check out a thread here: viewtopic.php?f=10106&t=30598

Basically I just threw this part together to sort of put the machine through its paces. I used G-code generated with Visual Mill Pro (which I don't own yet), this was some code that was generated for me to show off a couple features and check it out. This part used z-level roughing with a 1/4" straight bit, spiral machining with a 1/4" ball nose and then pencil line machining with the same bit. The pencil line machining really smoothed out the inside corner of the spiral.

Right now I'm thinking that visual mill for solidworks is my front runner but I'm not in too big of a hurry to buy as there's a lot of CAM packages out there with free evaluations.

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

Looking good Andy! Glad the new machine is working out for you.

I actually ordered a new Raptor from George last week--the Raptor I have is great, but I found myself still wanting a bit more travel in the Y axis. I ordered a 24X48--I didn't need or want any extra width, but the extra foot in length will let me do banjo cases on the CNC. This is about as big a machine as I can fit into my tiny shop. I'll have a very nice 24X36 Raptor up for sale once I get the new machine and get it up and running.

Dave

Looking good!

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Brad
Avon, OH

Fun...eh?

Looks like you're on the road Andy...nice work!

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I read Emerson on the can. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...true...but a consistent reading of Emerson has its uses nevertheless.

StuMusic