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Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: A few of my projects..

« on: May 07, 2014, 08:13:18 PM »

There has been a minor upgrades to my CNC since I last posted. Had a bit of a re-design courtesy of my brother.

Mods:
1. It now has 5 axises for machining cad wax
2. Steppers have been replaced for DC Servos.
3. Linear rails
4. Gantry upgrade.
5. 270mm Z travel (instead of 90mm)
6. Automatic Tool Chamger.

My brother modified a standard 2.2kw Chinese spindle to be an air operated ATC spindle. It takes a "cartridge" which uses a C1 collet. These are good for cutters up to 1/4" shank.
The cartridge can be removed and the standard ER11 collets can be used for manual tool changes if required.

Cheers.

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Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: A few of my projects..

« on: November 10, 2012, 11:33:04 AM »

Quote from: DICKEYBIRD on October 10, 2012, 01:40:49 PM

"Think-building" is always so easy!:)

Too true...

I haven't had a lot tof time to play recently but I decided to "level the bed of the router because there were visible discrepancies in the bed.

1mm down and still not close to flat.

1.5mm down and getting closer.

Haven't finished the final pass but I ended up having to remove 1.8mm to get a level surface.

You have to wonder how they can sleep at night selling a piece of machinery that is soo far out of true...

PS: the links should now work properly..

Cheers.

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Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: A few of my projects..

« on: October 09, 2012, 10:43:33 AM »

Quote from: DICKEYBIRD on October 09, 2012, 09:14:36 AM

Interesting pictures there S/S. Like Ricky Ricardo once said: "Lucy, joo got some splainin' to doo."

Well I like to tinker as well, my current "interest" is modifying CV style motorbike carbs to fit onto cars. There are a lot of fiddly parts that need to be made and that is why I originally bought the lathe, but I found out after I purchased it that the ways and screws were all but fubar.

After I (or actually my brother) started the retrofit, my boss informed me that he needed some unique "springs" made but was unable to find anyone willing to take on the task because the springs had to be made from 0.5mm stainless steel wire and be very accurate.

That's when I had the idea of the "wire bender" attachment and indexing the head of my lathe, to be able to make these springs. In the programming world it's called "Feature Creep"

..

Anyway, back to the lathe "so far"..

The cog closest to the headstock is to run the encoder and is grub screwed to the main shaft but the other cog has 2 bearings inside it and a thrust bearing running up against the V-pulley.

There are 2 grub screws that are removed when I'm not indexing the head.

Both indexing steppers go through a 100:1 harmonic drive but the on on the headstock has a further 3.75:1 belt drive reduction.

The original cross slide would have required a fair bit of modification to fit so my brother fabricated the "new" one.

Apart from that, the rest is pretty straight forward.

Talking of Feature Creep...

The next "Feature" will be a 2 axis (linear and rotary), live tooling attachment for the cross slide, but only if I get bored and actually finish designing it.

Hope this muddied the waters further..

Cheers.

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