First chips

The first chips have been cut with the temporarily reassembled X and Y axis. I am using the machine to make the mounting plates for the fixed bearing and the motor for the Z axis. Until the Z is finished, CAM files have to be manually edited to add pauses after Z moves; I use tool-change macros as a convenient way to do this. After editing I run through the whole program "cutting air" to make sure I didn't miss anything. It is a bit laborious, but a whole lot better than manually dialing XY coordinates to make a hole pattern (twice over if center drilling first!). And, watching the table cutting out the bore for the bearing is so much more satisfying than futzing around with my Chinese-import-grade boring head!

After drilling, I add counter-bores to some of the bolt holes.



Blasting away the chips from the 1/2" end mill (the hoggers are in the mail). This leaves an acceptable finish, but it isn't the best.

For the perimeter, I hold a chip brush against the cutter to pull the chips off the flutes. This hugely improves the finish.

Two mounting plates in about a day and a half - but that includes the learning curve for the CAM software (I'm trying out Aspire) and setting up Mach3. What took the most time was actually getting the Windows7 cad station to talk to the XP machine that runs the mill so I could transfer the files (thank you Microsoft). The second plate took about 1/4 of the time of the first one. The surface finish on the shoulder of the lower plate in the image is not great. The pocketing program required that the Z be retracted between each corner and it is very hard to hit exactly the same Z depth each for each cut. As the shoulder is not a bearing surface however, this doesn't matter. That is all I can do without further measurements of the relationship between the Z lead-screw and Z slide. Measurements that require dismantling the head and the column. Time for some more heavy-lifting.