This week I kept going with manufacturing parts for the stage.

Monday

Last week I finished up machining the rails and they are really good. They are definitely the nicest parts I have ever machined. They just had one problem I needed to fix. Two of the holes were quite siginifiantly under dameter, and also seemed to be tapered. To fix this I quickly put them in the mill and located them with a gauge pin in a collet, and plunged and end mill though the holes. This fixed it for now and mostly cleared up the issue. I might need to revisit this at some point but hopefully this did it. Ideally I ream this diameter but we don’t have the right reamer for it.

After I finished up that I also started the Stage booster. This is a really simple peice of aluminum at a specific height, designed to boost the stage off the plate to allow the height of the X axis motor mount to be correct. Due to time constraignts that day I was only able to square up the stock, however I did make the stock extremely square. Less than 0.0001 over 2.5 inches on one of the faces.

Mill Traming

Tuesday

On Tuesday I finished up the Stage booster. I faced all the sides down to dimension. As well as drilling all the holes to clear an M5 bolt. Then after all that was done, I took it to final thickness. I did it like this, so that I could save the surface finish on the top face. Even though its going to be completely hidden I want to get into the habbit of doing this.

Wednesday

Start machining pins, got 2 of them done

Wednesday was a lot of doing the exact same things, so I will just go over the process of making one entire pin.

Firstly the end face must be faced down square. Then doing the long facing opperations to bring the stock down to .25 inches. This was a little scary, as at .25 inches to maintain the SFM, I needed to run at 1300 rpm. After the correct Diameter is reached, I can then drill for an M4 tap, and then tap it. After that I part it off. The thing I noticed is that lathe work is much slower than mill work, and i’m not really sure why.

Mill Traming
This is pretty annoying to do, very tedious, however very crucial.
Mill Traming
Mill Traming

Thursday

Thursday was the exact same as Wednesday, however with a mishap. I accidentally lost one of the pins, so now I need to make another one. More practice I guess?