First alloy on the 3040 cnc (with 2.2kw spindle)

There are times when words are not needed. When you see a 3040 or 6040 cnc without any enclosure there is a good chance that the machine doesn't see heavy alloy cutting. It only takes a few videos to see how chips are thrown around when a 24krpm bit touches a block of alloy. As a prelude to any alloy being cut I enclosed the 3040 in a "terrarium". This was itself an interesting build and as usual I overdid the design. The top and bottom box frames are made of 5cm square timber with a fairly solid base panel. The back is just light junk with plywood bolted to tabs on each side so I can replace things as I feel. The door opens beyond 90 degrees to get right out of the way and closes to rest on the base 5cm timber at the front of the enclosure.

For anybody reading this I have one word of advice, any gaps in the first 50cm from the machine base will have chips thrown at them. So make sure that the angles the chips might come from near the spindle have been accounted for with your air venting that allows some cooling into the mix. The sides of this case are more than 80cm in height.

The next modification is a mister to help clear local chips and bring some light amount of cutting fluid into the cut zone. The first runs were just using a light spray of CDT over the cut zone before job start.

The very end of one of the first runs is shown in the below video.



The parts being cut are wheel mount crossover plates to allow an outdoor robot to have larger wheels attached. The wheels want M8 bolts, the motor mount is an actobotics pattern, so an M4 hole was a good fit there. Because it's CNC the part itself was cut with many splines to include material where it could do structural good and exclude it otherwise.

I found it useful to cut templates in MDF to test the fit before a final run. This fed into part 3 which includes mounting holes for all 4 bolts of the hub mount. The alloy version 4 also has rounded ends and is shown attached to the wheel. This will let some cheap $10 wheels which are 12 inch across mount to an actobotics based robot.

I'll have video of the "houndbot" in action using these mounts next time.