My round column RF30 mill to CNC conversion, the cheap way

[stioc]

I plan on doing something similar to my 2.5ton horizontal using a makerbase and some 50Nm steppers.

Awesome! pls post a link here when you do.

stioc,
Many thanks for your write up. You've inspired me to build a 3-axis router project. I'm just finishing my first arduino/stepper motor project for my 9x20 lathe.
Glen

That's fantastic, glad to share- do you have a thread or pics somewhere? I have a 9x20 that could become my next cnc victim lol

$516 has to be some sort of record.

Very resourceful

Thanks Paul, I'll be honest I can't take a lot of credit here because I couldn't have done it for this cheap or this quickly and easily without your kit. Thanks for all the tech-support too after I ran into my self-inflicted issues. I hope you post more on the forums such as this because I feel you have so many cool ideas and things to share especially with your Mech Eng. background.

 

[stioc]

OK I decided to make something on the newly converted CNC mill. It's a carriage stop for my lathe, the idea is to be able to attach it to the ways where it's fully movable along that axis. I started by taking some physical measurements of the ways profile, then sketched it out in Fusion360, extruded it to 3D, then generated the toolpath. I'm kinda getting the hang of this. For the toolpath I could've done contour and it would've been much faster but I decided to do a pocket because I really wanted to see how that comes out and the machining time of 54 mins would stress everything enough for me to have a good idea of what the machine is capable of.

I tried a shallow cut on wood first...broke the first 1/8" expensive endmill because I forgot to turn the motor on before I hit 'play', by the time I realized the damage was done, what an idiot! :lol_hitti

After swapping it out for another one I started the program again. This time the feeds and speeds that F360 picked were too aggressive and the second bit also bit the dust. Ugh, it's going to be a lot of expensive trial and error I guess

Third attempt, I set all the feeds and speeds to 5in/min and depth to .03in per pass It worked...well until I accidentally hit the ESC key on the keyboard, which is basically ESTOP...awesome! :willy_nil

Fourth attempt, this one worked, but I had to pause it because at one point the chip brush fibers got caught in the bit as I was trying to clear the chips...I won't be doing that again. Luckily I was able to resume it where I left off. Although the dimensions came out just a bit more loose so I wonder if that was the reason.

Anyway...here it is all done, my very first metal cut on the mill since the CNC conversion. Pretty exciting for me .



My fancy plywood sub-plate :lol:


That mark to the left is from the second broken bit


I'm using an old drill-bit as the stop since I didn't have a 3/8" rod handy.

 

[stioc]

CNC'd this address plate out of 1/4" alum 6061 - thinking of scrotch-brite'ng it to get the brushed-alum look?

Here's a quick 20sec video of it in action:
https://streamable.com/bbab2

Will need to build some sort of a box to keep all this off of everything around the mill and the garage floor!

 

[jwmelvin]

This is awesome; nice work.

 

[stioc]

Thank you!

 

[magicniner]

I was really considering Mach3 but for the first time in my life i got banned on a msg board...I guess for asking questions (perhaps too many?) about backlash compensation. Their Administrator quietly banned me, funny thing is he only banned one of my IP addresses so I can use an open proxy and still cruise around and even post if I wanted to since my account is still active.

I've been on there for 4+ years and if they ban you they do it at account level and you don't get to log in from anywhere, if they blocked your IP it's for something else, sometimes people lose access when problematic addresses are blocked such as when an attack uses a spoofed IP address.
There's a long and funny story about a man who's lawn mower died and was reluctant to ask his neighbour if he could borrow his, the tale boils down to not telling someone to shove something until you've actually asked for it first ;-)

 

[stioc]

I'm pretty sure it wasn't done at the account level because that would be visibile to everyone else on the thread that the user was banned. If you do it at the IP level then it's under the covers. Anyway, lots of people I know have had good luck with Mach3 and all I say is good for them but while there's a bit of a learning curve to LinuxCNC I find it far superior and customizable for the price. In the end it all worked out for the better for me.

 

[HBilly1022]

WOW!!!! You certainly achieved your goals of; easy, fast and cheap. Very nice work and thanks for posting.

 

[stioc]

I'm getting better at F360, I used to get very frustrated with it, I can now do the basic stuff pretty quickly from CAD to CAM so that's encouraging. I loaded my 5 most used tools into the TTS collet chucks created a tool library in F360 as well as in LinuxCNC.

This height gauge had about 8thou error in repeatability due to a wobbly base, after sanding it I got it down to 1.5thou.

I then realized I needed a collet rack. No worries, let's design it in F360 real quick and let's test the tool changes for the first time on a real part so this will be a single gcode file with different operations and different tools. I also want the endmill to plunge where the center drill drilled the holes. So far so good.

Now, let's go cut it...well, except I don't have any suitable stock material. Wait, I have this set of 1/8" aluminum toe alignment-setting plates left over from my racing days back in the early 2000s...time to sacrifice, err recycle them. So I rough cut one with the plasma. Mounted it on a 1/4" plywood spoil board (I really need a better spoil board), said a prayer or two and hit the go button :bowdown:

The machine asked for Tool 4, the center drill, popped it in, it set the correct offsets and made perfect starting holes. It then moved back up to z0 and asked for the next tool (the roughing end mill), popped it in and hit ok...it read the correct offsets and started plunging. Pretty quickly though I realized something was wrong because it plunged hard and black dust came out of the hole. Oh crap, that's the mill table it's roughing out! crap!!! I hit the Esc key, manually jogged the z axis up...yep, I definitely milled my mill! But how? wrong tool offset? nope. Ah, what a dummy! I input -0.7" in for stock bottom in CAM instead of -0.07...that's going to leave a mark!

After that it was all good, actually just about perfect how it all worked out. The engraving toolpath however, left me a little unhappy because it was trying to draw these tiny hair-lines that don't show up in the design, it was mostly cutting air (almost like trying to engrave a 3D part) so it was wasting time. I'll have to look into it a bit more or try to find a better way to engrave. Which btw I used a 1/16th carbide ball endmill for (running at 4 ipm at .005" DOC). Engraving toolpath did require that I classify it as a chamfer bit (i used 60deg so it doesn't try to plunge into the valleys) or else it wouldn't generate the toolpath. I really need to find single line text fonts for these simple engraving needs.

I spent pretty much all day in the garage cutting out this part, something i could've ordered for $20 on ebay I'm sure with a single mouse click but it was satisfying to see it come out as I'd envisioned it.

 

[kvt]

stoic Question, How are you keeping the head in line if you have to raise/lower it. That has been one of things I was wandering about. I have a RF30, It seems like shallow stuff is ok, But if I was to work on something requiring more depth, or longer tooling could be a problem.