I got a big chunk of 1/4″ 6061 aluminum plate and tried to mill it, with pretty depressing results. The setup just was nowhere near rigid enough to handle it. The force on the bit would cause enough flexure to pull the bit to the side or cause it to jam into the material. A …
While the ShapeOko worked much better with the Ridgid trim router than with the Dremel, the default spindle mounting brackets for the ShapeOko didn’t fit well because it’s so much wider than the Dremel. To even get it in there, I had to take it apart and remove the height adjustment mechanism. First order of …
Back in 2013 when we knew what address we were moving to, I decided to make a street sign with our address and names on it. I ordered fancy wood from Inventables and was going to route it on the ShapeOko. However, the ShapeOko has not yet been unpacked and it’s been 2.5 years so finally …
One of the remaining things to hook up to the mill were the limit switches. This has taken forever, but I was waiting on some shielded 2-conductor wire I ordered on ebay. It arrived a few days before Christmas, so now it was time to check that item off the list. I briefly talked about …
The last post described the physical setup of the mini mill CNC conversion. Apart from adding motors to the mill, you also need something to control those motors. Most people seem to just get a G540 motor controller from Geckodrive and hook it up to the Mach3 CNC software. This seems to be a nice “turnkey” solution …
As mentioned over the last few posts of the NC30 EFI project, I’m going to need to fabricate various little metal parts. That’s not something that I’ve had the capability of doing here. Back when I got the ShapeOko, I was hoping it was going to be able to do light aluminum work. While I …
As I’m now about to start fabricating actual parts for the Long-EZ, I was contemplating the easiest way to shape the foam pieces. This Long-EZ builder used a router to cut the depressions, but was left to do the tapered parts by hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to do this …