Dickey
12-31-2021, 10:33 AM
After going through a bit of a funk and letting my CNC machine languish for way too long, I've begun spinning it back up and setting up for some actual paying jobs with it. I eased into this by making some measurement changes to an intake flange I came up with several years ago for one of my custom intakes. These new flanges are thicker and I adjusted some of the cuts to accommodate a few manual adjustments after the fact that I had to make on the previous iteration. Below is the first one after I did a few passes to see where things were at temperature and cutting bit wise:
669
The finished product drops right in place on my jig and I should have it welded up soon.
Once these were done, I switched bits and tried out a regular wood cutting bit on some scrap 1x6 to get a sense of scale for an image a friend sent me to do on a large piece of wood:
670
Then out of curiosity I decided to see if I could do some actual engraving on some porcelain tile...which I believe I can now that I've adjusted the bed clamp apparatus though in this example I was on my last engraving bit and had smoked my others learning how to hold the the work properly while accommodating an appropriate pressure on the uneven tile via Z value. That's why the last letters up top are wiggly, I had to dial up the pressure considerably as the bit was dull but since I was just playing around to find out it didn't matter all that much:
671
All this is to say that I believe there to be more money in engraving random stuff than in cutting/milling car parts as I originally intended. I'd like to add a laser module to the CNC machine so I can etch away without any real consumables. I see such modules on Amazon for a few hundred dollars and while I'm sure the CNC can scoot such a device around, I'm not sure how to go about controlling it to pulse on and off appropriately. I am still running Mach3 on my machine so it may be that a software update is in order prior to going this route. I'd appreciate any thoughts or direction from people familiar with these tools.
669
The finished product drops right in place on my jig and I should have it welded up soon.
Once these were done, I switched bits and tried out a regular wood cutting bit on some scrap 1x6 to get a sense of scale for an image a friend sent me to do on a large piece of wood:
670
Then out of curiosity I decided to see if I could do some actual engraving on some porcelain tile...which I believe I can now that I've adjusted the bed clamp apparatus though in this example I was on my last engraving bit and had smoked my others learning how to hold the the work properly while accommodating an appropriate pressure on the uneven tile via Z value. That's why the last letters up top are wiggly, I had to dial up the pressure considerably as the bit was dull but since I was just playing around to find out it didn't matter all that much:
671
All this is to say that I believe there to be more money in engraving random stuff than in cutting/milling car parts as I originally intended. I'd like to add a laser module to the CNC machine so I can etch away without any real consumables. I see such modules on Amazon for a few hundred dollars and while I'm sure the CNC can scoot such a device around, I'm not sure how to go about controlling it to pulse on and off appropriately. I am still running Mach3 on my machine so it may be that a software update is in order prior to going this route. I'd appreciate any thoughts or direction from people familiar with these tools.