The various goings on in my workshop
Having sorted the design phase, it was time to start making the pieces of the power drawbar. I started on the mounting plate by cutting a piece of 16mm plate boring a 35mm hole and counter boring to 45mm to a depth of 8mm. Drilled 4 x 6.2mm holes and counter bored to 11mm to…
I decided a fair few years back that I wanted to make use of the Tormach TTS system on my Mini Mill. To that end I purchased a few items from Tormach whilst I was in the USA on holiday back in 2014, including the R8 TTS adapter collet (part #50568). At the time this was $23.75 (£15.00),…
The next part of the articulating spacer was the brass wedges. First I cut a couple of pieces of bar stock then machined them to the correct width. then length. Next I drilled the holes for the stud. Drilled and tapped the holes in the end of the forked piece. Then setup for milling the…
This is the second part of the articulating spacer Here is the Fusion 360 drawing of the relevant part.This second piece is the rear plate that measures 10x100x16mm I did not take a full set of machining pictures for this one, as it is not a particularly complex part. The first operation was to square…
The articulating spacer for the SX2 is a design by Donald Bird that was posted on CNC Forums. The plans are all imperial, but this is a metric sized mill, so I converted all of the dimensions to metric and drew it up in Fusion 360.This first piece is the front mount plate that is…
Having finally decided on a layout for the plate in the control box, I decided it was time to drill and tap the holes for the motherboard and stepper drivers. The plate itself was previously used for something else, and so there are other extraneous holes dotted around the plate. 16 x M3 holes later,…
Next up were one of the bearing mounts, 3 of these are required as well. Here is the model of the mount. First I cut about a 60mm piece from a bar of 2 1/2″ (63.5mm) x 3/8″ (9.25mm) flat bar, this originally came from ebay seller diamondengineeringsupplies at a cost of £14.76 for an…
I finally decided to start making the mechanical parts for my CNC conversion. This is a drawing showing various stages of axis mount evolution in exploded form. The ones nearest the middle are the ones that I am actually going to build, starting with the stepper mounts. I have decided to go with 60mm square…
Having successfully installed the OS, my next step was to try and reduce the number of writes that were likely to hit the CF card, this involved moving many of the logging and temporary areas to use tmpfs and also turn off writing time updates every time a file is accessed. This is all documented…
I have been umming and ahhing over which stepper motors and drivers to buy for my mini mill for over a year now and not really making any progress on making a decision. The other day I was comparing prices of nema 23 stepper motors once again when I came across some for sale by…