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.

3040/24,000 CNC first dry run in place

The progression has finally reached an upgraded CNC with high power spindle. Things still move around fine to the eye, the next step is likely to do some test drills at known distances to see if the additional weight has had an impact on the steppers that can't be easily seen.

A few interesting times when spinning up to 24,000. At around 320hz there was a new loud rattle. I think this turned out to be resonance with either something that was on the cutting plate or the washers on the toggle clamps.

There is going to be video once this machine starts eating alloy. The CNC needs to be lowered into an enclosure (the easier part) so that chips and the like go into a known location. The enclosure itself needs to be made first ;)

Ironically a future goal is to be going smaller. Seeing if twice the number of microsteps can be pulled off in order to get better precision and cut QFN landing zones on PCBs.

3040 spindle upgrade: the one day crossover plate

Shown below is the spindle that came with my 3040 "engraving" cnc next to the 2.2kw water cooled monster that I am upgrading to. See my previous blog post for videos of the electronics and spindle test on the bench.

The crossover plate which I thought was going to be the most difficult part was completed in a day. I had some high torsion M6 nuts floating around with one additional great feature, the bolt head is nut shaped giving a low clearance compared to some bolts like socket heads. The crossover is shown from the top in the below image. I first cut down the original spindle mount and sanded it flat to make the "bearing mount" as I called it. Then the crossover attaches to that and the spindle mount attaches to the crossover.

Notice the bolts coming through to the bearing mount. The low profile bolt head just fits on each side of the round 80mm diameter spindle mount. I did have to do a little dremeling out of the bearing mount to fit the nuts on the other side. This was a trade off, I wanted those bolts as far out from the centre line as possible to maximize the possibility that the spindle mount would bolt on flat without interfering with the bolts that attach the crossover to the bearing mount.

A more side profile is shown below. The threaded rod is missing for the z-axis in the picture. It is just a test fit. I may end up putting the spindle in and doing some "dry runs" to make sure that the steppers are happy to move the right distances with the additional weight of the spindle. I did a test run on the z-axis before I started, just resting the spindle on the old spindle and moving the z up and down.

I need to drop out a cabinet of sorts for the cnc before getting into cutting alloy. The last thing I want is alloy chips and drill spirals floating around on the floor and getting trecked into other rooms.

3040 for alloy

I have finally fired up a 2.4kw 24,000 rpm spindle on the test bench. This has water cooling and is VFD controlled. The spindle runs on 3 phase AC power.



One thing that is not mentioned much is that the spindle itself and bracket runs to around 6-7kg. Below is the spindle hitting 24,000 rpm for the first time.


With this and some other bits a 3040 should be able to machine alloy.