Sunday morning progress report from Weston W.V. As most of you know, I have been using what started out as an HF micro-mill, with expanded tables, ball screws etc as time went by. Its been a money & time sink.
Making the joints for that blanket chest on the small mill used every millimeter of its X ball screw & all sorts of rube goldberg contraptions to support the long boards that were capable of tipping the small mill over on its table if the far end was not somehow supported. And that I am bringing a Grizzly GO704 to life right now. Due to spring back in the small mill, one of the ways to get a good glue joint fit was to 'adjust' the size of the mill doing the carving in the gcode. Using a std .250" tool diameter compensation added to the path resulted in a Green & Green box joint that had to be driven together with a very heavy hammer, which in turn caused the white pine test cuts to split, and to get a good fit for a minimum glue film, I needed to fudge the tool diameter down to .243", effectively pushing the rad of the tool an extra .0035" to make it fit correctly. Yesterday I ran that same code on the GO704 on a small scrap of Mahogany, making a test dummy of one of the base skirting mating end joints. The improved stiffness of the GO704's frame made that setting produce a pretty sloppy joint! Its something I had not realized I would encounter. But its a pleasant surprise too. :) I will measure the clearance I got with feeler blades and 'correct' that before I start carving up another $1400 worth of Mahogany for the next 3 of those chests. The target is about a thou for the glue film. Its enlightening too as I had been doing it with 6 passes for the full cut depth on the toy mill & having more spindle power now, I had cut that to 3, and might see if 2 passes will do, one is tempting but the tools side cutting edge is not long enough to do it in one pass. The improved rigidity also showed in the quality of the cut, where I could see the stepdowns in the cuts made on the toy mill, but they are invisible in the cuts made by the GO704. That is a VBSEG right there. I intend to make one for each of my surviving children, and deliver them before I fall over. Now, if the connectors I ordered ever get spit out by China Post so I can put quck connects on the cabling hooking all this up, I'll be ready to move all this from a work table in front of it to some shelving above the keyboard furniture I've built so I can sit down and write/edit gcode in comfort. I also see that having 2 10' pieces of 2.5" vacuum hose adapted to a 1.5hp dust collector is not going to do it, not enough air flow, so I'll have to get some more 4" and a 4" Y, so I can use it for both the planer and the mill. That may result in the acquisition of a 4" version of the Oneida Dust Deputy. Warning, Dust Deputy testimonial: The 2.5" version, in front of a 12.5 gallon shop-vac, gets 99.9% of it, with the shop vac's bottom staying amazingly clean, while the 5 gallon bucket under the Dust Deputy has collected 3 gallons of sawdust from the table saws dust port. And $30 hepa filters in the shop-vac last pretty close to forever. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
