Back to It, ducting and mill turning (again)

Back from France

Two weeks in France flew past and all we seemed to do was jobs around the place. Weather pretty mixed but one very hot day which of course was the day before we left. Surprise surprise. It has since been very hot out there but equally the weather here has been excellent.

Background Air Extract System

I have often been slightly concerned about fumes in the workshop. You know the pervasive smell of cutting fluid and welding smoke etc so first job back was to install a background extract system. My colleague Dave arrived this morning and between us we put in a fan and ducting to vent through a custom roof tile (shingle ?). OK the draft won’t rip your clothes off but it will just keep the air moving especially in winter when the hatches are battened down.

Mill Turning Tooling Jig

Having tested mill turning with a Heath Robinson set up I have been accumulating parts to create a proper custom jig to fit on the 440 table. This will take 3 turning tools, 3 ER16 collets for drill bit holding, a centre drill and a boring bar. Currently it is drawn in Fusion 360 but there are one or two issues to sort before committing to CAM. More to follow once it is fully underway.

G53 Tool Change Location Update

Another update (not yet resolved) is my G53 tool change routine which has a slight weakness. As previously mentioned the Tormach post processor does not always put a WCS following a tool change. To overcome this I was hard coding a G54 after the new G53 tool change routine. The problem is that occasionally I might not be using WCS G54 but any one of the eight other available references. So some extra code is going to be needed to make the WCS a variable that mirrors the WCS being used. Head scratching so far reveals that the post processor sees the WCS as a number from 1-9 and then converts this to G54 through G59.3 in a separate sub routine. I need somehow to overcome this. More to follow on this one too.

Sign Off

Anyway good to be back in the UK (and the workshop), great weather for the last three days and it looks we are going to sit out on the terrace tonight with steak and chips washed down with a glass or two of red. Takes some beating.

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