Senior Week 21
This week I hit a very big milestone. All of the machining for the stage should be done.
Friday
I decided to take a short lived break from the stage for a day, and mainly help Tanzerul with mounting the axle to the shopping cart. unfortunately we need a significant amount of reinforcement in order to make it useable and not break. This is still a massive step foreward for the project.
Monday
I started working on the Y axis, as I finished up the x-axis the week prior. The y-axis is a much simpler design just because there is no base in the way. I started with the arm, which seemed simple enough. In a CNC machine this would have been very easy, but on a manual machine this was going to be the hardest part I was going to machine. I started by getting the outside to dimension, but after that I ran out of time, and had to continue on tuesday.
Tuesday
I started Tuesday by continuing on the manual machining of the arm. Today I had to start machinging the slots for the bolts. This was not easy. I messsed up both tries, and I soon decieded that I needed to just CNC it if I wanted to get it done right.
I was quite surprised in how fast I was able to get this done. I had the cut finished by the end of the day.
Wednesday
This day I just had to clean up the CNC cut from the previous day, as well as drill a few holes. This was another opportunity to us the roughing endmill. This tool still amazes me with how much material it can remove. I was able to free the part in one, .6" DOC pass. This pass’s feedrate was still only about .002" per flute, which makes me wonder how much faster I could push it.
After that, I had enought time during and after school to finish up the last part. This presented me with a few challenges. In the CAM software I had set my X and Y planes wrong, so the endmill was taking massive cuts where it thought it wasn’t. Unfortunately this saw the death of a 1/4" endmill. After I had that sorted out everything went very smoothly. I drilled and tapped the holes on the manual machine though, because after the 1st base, I do not trust the Tormach one bit in that area.
Thursday
This day was dedicated to assembly and sorting out all of the kinks in the project. Luckly I have another day for this, as I ran out of time. I am facing an issue with the stage itself, where the motors lack the required torque to move the micrometer. I am trying to fix this by putting weaker springs on the axis, because in our use case there is no reason to have them that strong.
