Teflon4 published a new build:

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Thank you. Yes the LED ring was one of the first things I created and cut on the plate maker.

The link to the ring design is here with the two halves hot glued together once I'd put the LED's in place.
My PSU is 24v so I went for two parallel sets of 6 serial LED's with a 220ohm resistor.

 

Good luck with it northwest. I used surface mount LED's I desoldered from a white 3528 LED strip I had bought from ebay for another project, but I'm pretty sure any LED will work so long as they fit.

Soldering the SMD LED's needs a steady hand but it's not too difficult; the hard part is making sure they are the right way round. I originally planned to make a PCB but impatience got the better of me and I just soldered them up with thin wire which worked fine.

The tooling plate arrived so I'm preparing to drill it to fit my Y-Axis. I'll be using the machine itself as I've no drill press. I'm quite nervous of making a mess of such an expensive lump of metal! Wish me luck.

 

I used aluminiumwarehouse.co.uk in the end, simply as you could buy custom sizes online. Shipping was £15, slow delivery due to them not having an item in stock the web site, then taking a couple of days to let me know. I got the tooling plate and a sheet of 3mm to sit the machine on and both seemed pretty roughly handled. There doesn't seem to be that much choice online.

I took my time and drilled the plate and everything seems to have gone well I'm just waiting on some 3mm spacers from Ooznest to get it mounted.

 

I've been working on it sporadically but I must admit its driving me up the wall; I can't seem to get anything actually straight.

It's made that much more frustrating with the tool plate not actually being flat. It seems I had too high expectations as apparently it's tolerance is 0.5mm which unless I'm missing something is poorer than the MDF it replaces.

I'm persisting though and waiting on delivery of a countersink tool so I can sink the plate bolts out of the way.

I bought the rails as a kit from ebay here. They seem good quality to me and work well. To clear the Y-Axis C-Beam the rails need raising 3mm and I've ended up with a setup like this :

Y-Axis Experiment V13 by Teflon4 posted Feb 19, 2016 at 12:03 AM

 

Still waiting on the countersink (should be tomorrow) but I've put everything together to check.

Once I have a working machine again I can replace the 3mm spacers I've used to raise the rails with a machined part.

Ultimately I intend to drill a pattern of 4.2mm holes in the plate to tap to M5 so I can use bolts for work holding.
I'm not sure I'm looking forward to hand tapping 63 holes but hopefully I'll only have to do it once

Tool Plate Setup by Teflon4 posted Feb 19, 2016 at 5:18 PM

 

I'm becoming convinced I can dream better than I can machine.

Glad I wired up my e-stop; the countersink almost ripped the machine apart bouncing about in the hole. I figured it was a feed or speed issue so tried a few with the same results. It's more of a burr with lots of flutes so I'm guessing it's getting clogged up. I bought the wrong type for aluminium.

With each failed attempt I learn something new but the tool plate looks more and more like a dogs dinner I may have to call this one a "prototype" and buy a fresh plate once I've worked out what I'm doing.

 

Brushing the countersink debacle under the carpet for the moment; I've moved on to cutting the rail risers.

I thought I'd upload some video to show it actually cuts stuff I've not spent any time on my mister setup so an airbrush loaded with water soluble oil coolant is what you're seeing. It works really well for short cuts but the airbrush compressor overheats if I try and do too much.

I think I've got some issue with oscillation when cutting around the profile. It cuts fine then kind of loses it for a second then mostly goes back fine again. Could this be be a symptom of the spindle being too heavy for the machine? You can see and hear the effect at the 1 minute mark.

 

I think I'm going to declare the tool plate mod complete.



I had a go at milling some very fine PCB work. It almost worked but due to the PiBot board I use lagging behind the latest GRBL release I can't use height probing so I got a pretty variable depth.



The work holding left a bit to be desired too and led to alignment errors as you can see with the drill holes being out.
For reference the PCB is 45mm in diameter.

 

Thanks Metalguru, I'd seen those but couldn't quite see how they would work but not I look at it, the other side of the tool would give it away.

I ended up using a cordless drill with the burr I have and a lot of WD40; I would characterise the results as "adequate" but I'll grab a set of those to have in the toolbox. Thanks for the info.

 

I did go through a few solutions for the Y-Axis before I settled on the "upside down" method I ended up with.

I did have a look at bellows searching for pleated blinds I could cut up, rubber boots I could re-purpose etc but didn't have much joy.
I read a couple of blogs talking about folding paper bellows to specification then soaking/painting them in something to make them harder wearing and flame/water proof.
Ultimately it seemed like a stall and I figured I'd be making new ones every few months.

The "almost best" solution I came up with was just to mill two grooves in the Y-Axis end plates so I could slot a piece of 3 x 80 x 505mm acrylic to offer some protection.
I needed to give up the middle two support screws from the build plate so the acrylic slipped between the build plate and the base board.
Other than the loss of support on an already wobbly base, my problem was (as usual for me) tooling. Once I took the plates off the Y-Axis, I had nothing I could accurately mill the grooves with.
I did run this setup with a 3 x 80 x 500mm acrylic piece just duct taped to each plate which worked quite well.

 

After getting the Y table all sorted, I started trying to cut the aluminium project that prompted it.

After a handful of alu chips found their way into the PSU and a stepper driver causing a small explosion and some unexpected expense, I'm now in the process of upgrading as below.

Note the raised platform which has an MDF sheet as a sliding tray on which I'm mount things I don't want to explode.

I've also had some issues with 2.4kg of spindle with 0.8kg spindle mount stressing the 6 v-wheels on the x-axis so I've shamelessly nicked a design element of the OX in an effort to add stability.

This has also allowed me to flip the X much as I did with the Y to have the lead screw exposed at the back instead of the front; hopefully helping to keep that clear.

 

A nice side effect of the slightly reduced X reach caused by the mod is that I've discovered I can flip the "L" plates at either end of the X Axis and in a crash situation the gantry plate hits them before the wheels do.
A crash is never good, but the ones I've had where the wheel runs into that sharp 45 degree edge at 8000mm/min killing a fivers worth of v-wheel have been the worst I've experienced.

 

I'm not sure if the water cooled spindles are lighter. I imagined they would be about the same but with the added complication of the water cooling.

Here's the state-of-play at the moment. The 6.5mm MDF board cut to the right size sits nicely in the slots allowing it to slide in and out for maintenance. During testing I've got it sliding out the front but I'll swap that once I've proved it's working.

 

Indeed; I started with MDF but it just got saturated when using lubricant so wanted something more waterproof. I went with a sheet of 5251 in the end.