X-Axis is now ready!

The thread plate is now mounted to the base with thread lock in select locations. The top can still come off easily so I can drill holes to mount the gantry to the alloy tongue that comes out the bottom middle (there is one on the other side too).

Without the 75mm by 50mm by 1/4 inch 6061 alloy angle brackets you could flex the steel in the middle. Now, well... it is not so easy for a human to apply enough force to do it. The thread plate is only supported by 4 colonnades at the left and right side. The middle is unsupported to allow the gantry to travel 950mm along. I think the next build will be more a vertical mill style than sliding gantry to avoid these rigidity challenges.

The X Axis is growing...

The new cnc X axis will be around a meter in length. This presents some issues with material selection as steel that is 1100mm long by 350mm wide and 5mm thick will flex when only supported by the black columns at each end. I have some brackets to sure that up so the fixture plate will not be pushed away or vibrate under cutting load.




The linear rails are longer than the ballscrew to allow the gantry to travel the full length of the ballscrew. In this case a 1 meter ballscrew allows about 950mm of tip to tip travel and thus 850mm of cutter travel. The gantry is 100mm wide, shown as just the mounting plate in the picture above.

The black columns to hold the fixture plate are 38mm square and 60mm high solid steel. They come in at about 500grams a pop. The steel plate is about 15kg. I was originally going to use 38mm solid square steel stock as the shims under the linear rails but they came in at over 8kg each and the build was starting to get heavy.

The columns are m6 tapped both ends to hold the fixture plate up above the assembly. I will likely laminate some 1.2mm alloy to the base of the fixture plate to mitigate chips falling through the screw fixture holes into the rails and ballscrew.

I have to work out the final order of the 1/4 inch 6061 brackets that sure up the 5mm thick fixture plate yet. Without edge brackets you can flex the steel when it is only supported at the ends. Yes, I can see why vertical mills are made.

I made the plate that will have the gantry attached on the cnc but had to refixture things as the cnc can not cut something that long in any of the current axis.



It is interesting how much harder 6061 is compared to some of the more economic alloys when machining things. You can see the cnc machine facing more resistance especially on 6mm and larger holes.  It will be interesting to see if the cnc can handle drilling steel at some stage.

5 axis cnc fun!

The 5th axis build came together surprisingly well. I had expected much more resistance getting the unit to be known to both fusion360 and LinuxCNC. There is still some tinkering to be done for sure but I can get some reasonable results already. The video below gives an overview of the design:



Shown below is a silent movie of a few test jobs I created to see how well tool contact would be maintained during motion in A and B axis while the x,y,z are moved to keep the tool in the right position. This is the flow toolpath in Fusion360 in action. Non familiarity with these CAM paths makes for a learning curve which is interesting when paired with a custom made 5th that you are trying to debug at the same time.



I haven't tested how well the setup works when cutting harder materials like alloy yet. It is much quieter and forgiving to test cutting on timber and be reasonably sure about the toolpaths and that you are not going to accidentally crash to deep into the material after a 90 degree rotation.

5th axis getting up to speed

After a little bit of calibration and tinkering in the fusion360 cps output filter files the cnc is starting to take advantage of the new 5th axis. Below is a "Flow" multiaxis toolpath finishing a sphere with a flat endmill.

There are still some issues that I have to address. It has been a surprisingly good experience so far. Starting out cutting 5 sides of a block and moving on to cutting the edges at an angle. This is the third test where I rough out the sphere using a 3d adaptive path and then use a flow multiaxis path to clean things up. Things look better in video and there is some of that to come.