Made a business card holder

[Boswell]

that is strange that there is such a price difference. I agree with with Jim that you could probably cut your cycle time per part considerably. I don't often do multiple part production runs but the few times that I have I could count on considerable improvements from my first "prototype" runs. There are lots on way to optimize starting with maximizing the Feeds and Speeds but also with workholding and how you setup the machining steps in the CAM system. When I did the Lego parts (Avitar) I took the best output I could get from the CAM system I was using and then hand-coded some efficiency improvements that were pretty simple but took off a lot of time. The good news is that you don't have to invest much to find out if they will sell or not so almost no risk. BTW, have you looked at ETSY as a possibly place to sell? More Art oriented marketplace.

 

[dlane]

You make me a horizontal one and I’ll send you a bunch of 6061 material in a flat rate med box. These are some short ones but I have longer larger pieces I’ll send, these are quick change Kurt vise jaws .

I have buckets of them , just don’t have the masters for them, pm me if interested

 

[alloy]

I agree I can speed the machine time up, I'll just have to see just how much. I've not found any high speed settings in mastercam yet. The feed rates are screwy. You set it for 6061 material and the 1/2 end mill comes out at 1.68 ipm and 1069 rpm. Obviously way to slow. I'm taking 3 passes at .25 deep and last pass at .15 and one finish pass. I set it to 3500 rpm and 30 ipm. I don't have any tolerance to hit, just want a good finish on it.

I've not dealt with coast aluminum before. I see they have a PDF file for their materials, but no pricing. Also doesn't say if they ship.

You make me a horizontal one and I’ll send you a bunch of 6061 material in a flat rate med box. These are some short ones but I have longer larger pieces I’ll send, these are quick change Kurt vise jaws .
View attachment 282605View attachment 282604
I have buckets of them , just don’t have the masters for them, pm me if interested

I'll pm you and see what we can work out. I need to get material first. I only came up with this yesterday so haven't had any time to work everything out.

 

[JimDawson]

I've not dealt with coast aluminum before. I see they have a PDF file for their materials, but no pricing. Also doesn't say if they ship.

You have to call them or email for a quote. Pricing seems to be a function of the amount ordered, they will sell less than bar lengths, but you pay a premium for that, but still normally less than the retailers. Yes they deliver/ship, but I think there is a minimum order for free delivery. We normally will call single bars and have them deliver larger orders. We have had them deliver as little as 30 or 40 lbs in bar lengths. They also have a CNC cutting line, if you need bars chopped up into specific lengths they can handle that.

I'm pretty sure the local Metal Supermarkets store buys their aluminum from Coast Aluminum in bar lengths, then they mark it up about 100% Metal Supermarkets does have a rem room, aluminum is $3 / lb as I recall, but you have to actually go there to get it.

 

[alloy]

I called and they have a minimum $100 order, plus $10 per order fee. I just have to decide if I want to order 2 bars and make 40 parts and they possibly won't sell. Looks like I can do them for $35 each if I got materials from them.

 

[macardoso]

Alloy,

Try looking at BuyMetal.com. When I compared 6 months ago, they were the cheapest for aluminum of any online supplier I could find. No minimum order and $15 flat rate up to 70lbs (size doesn't matter).

Also I have extensively used Mastercam 2018 for my personal CNC. I'm a very long way off from being any kind of expert, but let me know if you get stuck on anything. It is an immensely powerful program, but doesn't have the "free" community behind it.

Mike

 

[JimDawson]

I called and they have a minimum $100 order, plus $10 per order fee. I just have to decide if I want to order 2 bars and make 40 parts and they possibly won't sell. Looks like I can do them for $35 each if I got materials from them.

If you can plan ahead, you could piggyback on one of our orders. We normally order $500 to $5000 worth at a time, so get a pretty good price. Not sure when we will be ordering again, we just ran about 1000 lbs of parts so we're stocked up right now. You would have to come down here to get it. But no cutting charge, you can use my band saw

 

[alloy]

I'll take a look there tonight when I get home.

I completely agree mastercam is very powerful, and hard to learn. I have the streaming teacher series but it seems the problems I run into aren't covered specifically. I know they can't address everything, just too many possibities to cover.

I will pm you later, I get stuck a lot. I am embarrassed to tell you how long it took me to program the wrench. But I'm making progress, slow but sure.

 

[Be_Zero_Be]

That's a really really neat card holder.
I used to work for a prosthetic company.
Here is our card holder.

 

[alloy]

I ordered material from Coast today, enough for 40 parts. It was was a wash with buymetals.com for price, but coast is fairly close and hopefully I'll get the material on Friday.

That's a great idea for a card holder for a prosthetic company.

I want to let everyone know that in just a couple of days macardoso has been a really great help to me with mastercam. I wanted to say thanks to him publicly.

I just hope at some point I can be of help to someone here like he has to me.