I absolutely love my new PM-835S knee mill. Lots more precise, quieter, and easier to use than my "old reliable" vintage Grizzly G1007/RF-30 (recently sold). Now I'm busy adding a few goodies like those I had on the Grizzle. One of these is a spindle light - my "vintage" eyes can use all the light they can get! So I bought a couple of automotive "Angel eyes" ring lights and extracted the LED modules. Designed a compact mount for them, which also incorporates a photosensor for the MachTach I recently assembled.
Here's a CAD screenshot of the complete assembly, as it will be mounted below the bearing retainer nose of the spindle. The black-and-white stripey thing is a strip of paper I will apply to the spindle, so the photosensor can count the RPMs.
The photosensor housing will include wiring for the ring lights.
Having a small CNC mill allows me to design parts that would be VERY difficult to do on the big mill. Here's a CAD rendering of the housing, still within the block of starting material (1 ⅛" thick polycarbonate, about 3 ¼" x 2"):
After I got it milled, the question became, how to extract the itty bitty part (about 5/8" tall) from the 1 1/8" block of polycarbonate. I started by filling in the milled areas with wax. Easily visible is the "sink" that formed as the wax shrunk during cooling. No biggie. I used a sharp chisel to remove the excess wax. Front and back views of the part at that point. The bevel, counterbore and miscellaneous holes are artifacts form the chunk of material I'd scrounged from a dumpster.
I held the block in the mill vise and cut away almost all the back side to the specified part height, leaving two "bars" to support the part inside the wax (which did help keep the part in place, but was not trustworthy as far as a firm hold was concerned).
I then carefully milled away the bars.
I was then able to very easily push out the part and also the wax support. Good thing I didn't depend too much on the wax to "firmly" hold the part! The part itself was exactly what I was hoping for!
Just for fun, I decided to try using the wax and surrounding block as a mold. Reassembled the two together and mixed up a batch of slow cure epoxy. Added powdered aluminum, de-bubbled in a homemade vacuum chamber.
Poured the epoxy into the wax "mold," which I'd clamped to a chunk of wood covered with wax paper.
Two days later ... epoxy was still pretty soft. It was some pretty old stuff; I guess that's why it didn't harden the way it did when I'd first bought it. The "puddle" of excess epoxy I'd poured out had the consistency of an equivalent thickness of polyethylene. When I tried unmolding, the epoxy stuck surprisingly well to the wax. Had to break the wax off in chunks, then put the replica part into some nearly boiling water to float the last bits of wax off. Here's the result. NOT something I'd want to depend on in the future, but interesting ... maybe useful for an emergency repair?