Had a bad day on Saturday. I was milling a small tooling plate on the PCNC440 and got distracted. Result was a coolant puddle migrating into the bottom of the Tormach keyboard followed by a broken Haimer tip. Doom and and major gloom. The keyboard was a write off as the fluid had got into the capacitive keyboard laminated sheets.
As it turned out a new keyboard was much cheaper to buy from Amazon than import another one from Tormach being only GBP6 and the Haimer tip while a bit more expensive was imported from Germany via Amazon.
I was in the process of trying to work out why the Z settings appeared to be changing while drilling the matrix of holes on the tooling plate. The drill bit length was still the same figure as entered in the offset tooling table but the hole depth had reduced. I think it might be the Tormach Tooling Collet not being fully seated into the spindle and it had jumped home. Having just installed a new air compressor for the Fog Buster and the tool changer, it could be the air pressure was a bit low and not fully opening the R8 collet. As soon as the new Haimer tip arrives I will get back to it.
While ‘off-air’ so to speak I have been doing some 3D modelling on Fusion 360 to create some home grown Christmas gifts for the kids. First one off is a customised napkin ring with a brass ring at each end. The exercise taught me how to form text around a circular body (thanks to John at NYC CNC for the demo video). Not very sexy but functional.
I struggled with cutting the brass rings and was about to design them out and go to all PLA when I had the idea to use the Kennedy Power Hacksaw like a bacon slicer to cut off thin circular shims of brass from a 2″ tube. It worked well, was more efficient on waste than parting off in the lathe and gave a consistently wide slice.
Next request is for customised wine bottle stoppers. Not sure wine bottles stay unfinished long enough in our house to justify this but let’s see what Fusion can deliver for the kids.
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