Friday 12 May 2017

Check out

Made up a quick test piece for the face mill in Fusion 360.


I'm using the 50mm face mill to face off the top surface, then using the 50mm face mill to do a 2D contour on the vertical faces. The inserts are designed to cut on both edges, so this should work out. The tool paths look reasonable ie what I'd expect.

I don't fancy crashing my new tool and inserts on their first outing, so I'm going to do some air cutting. This will take the form of a piece of soft 6mm aluminium rod pretending to be a 50mm face mill. It's about 10mm shorter than the face mill so shouldn't make contact in the vertical axis either:
Here it is, set up at the G54 origin of the workpiece:
Had to raise the machine vise somewhat, otherwise the Z axis doesn't have enough movement to reach the bottom of the stock. If I simply lift the whole table, the guards will hit the underside of the console. So I found some 3"x1" black steel to pack it up.
Setting the vise up so the jaws are aligned with the X axis:

Here's me checking out the G54 coordinates at the front top left of the stock. I can use the MDI to move to G53 X200 Y390 where I can access the work and the vise, then move to the work origin G54, then return to the G53 X200 Y 390, as it will once the job has finished.
And doing my air cut:
The G54 origin is on the top front left of the stock. The work piece is 1.5mm that, so the depth of cut should be around 1.5mm if I set up the face mill with its control point at the G54 origin. I can set X and Y accurately enough using the 6mm rod and then set the Z axis with the actual cutter. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, nothing went drastically wrong. No broken inserts or heavy crashes. But the finish wasn't fantastic, not least on the front edges. And the final cut along the front sounded crap. Arguably I should have given it some WD40 to stop the swarf sticking to the tool but that wasn't the problem here.

Looking closely, you can see the swarf on the base of the vise dancing about. It's probably not surprising when you look at the flimsy scheme I've used to raise the vise as described above. There is also a clear step between the first and second contour passes. Seems the vise has been moving about...

I think I need to make more of an effort to turn my phone on its side when videoing.

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