When I say "broad", I mean relatively speaking. The flat bottom is about .250" x .800", with a .021" thick floor. We're also looking at hybrid machines, or moving the build plate to a mill after printing, so tight features can be skimmed. Not all brands of printer have 6/4-ELI powder available though.

Their tech says they can do 6/4-ELI. The tech also got back tome on tolerance, and claims .002". The parts do have a broad, flat, bottom, to which the support could be attached and wired off. The mechanical stresses on these parts are very low (the material choice is for biocompat and marketability), so I'm hoping stress relieving could be skipped.

I'm looking at something like this: https://xactmetal.com/affordable-metal-3d-printing-xm200c/ or this: https://www.farsoon-gl.com/products/fs121m/ for production of small, Ti6Al4V-ELI medical device parts. What tolerances can be expected once a process is fully dialed in? I figure if it can just be consistent and repeatable, the input model can be tweaked to adjust feature dimensions. I'm also wondering about support removal, and how labor intensive it has to be. Thanks

Go for it. Just make sure the drilled diameter is what the tap manufacturer recommends.

Balax: https://ecomm.productivity.com/itemdetail/BALA 00102-01T

A few months ago I had to make 100 parts with six 000-120 threads in each, Ti6Al4V-ELI. I started out threadmilling, but it was taking several minutes per part, and I had to keep gauging, adjusting the offset, and rerunning to keep the threads in tolerance. Each threadmill was only good for about two dozen parts. Same job came up again, and this time I got form taps; one and done for each hole, about a second per hole. The one tap lasted the whole job, and every hole was perfect. If you have a very small number of parts to do, threadmilling is probably easier and safer, especially on large threads. Form tapping is WAY faster, provided you have the right material-specific tap and enough torque. #10 threads are the upper limit for form tapping in Ti on my little baby 20 taper CM-1's.

A GeForce 3070 is keeping up with my work just fine, even when I do an array of a hundred or so parts in a sheet, but my parts are smol.

For threads in Ti, I find form taps work well, where applicable.

Use material specific cutters, use HSMAdvisor for starting parameters, and avoid full width slotting if you can. Dynamic paths work well. Make sure your part is well fixtured and supported, since the material is more flexible and elastic than steel.

The Bambu X1C comes with a hardened steel nozzle. I got some Polymaker CF Nylon, haven't tried it out yet; I've just been using PLA+ so far.

I got a Bambu Labs X1C Combo a few months ago. It really beats the pants off the Cel Robox I had before. I've done a few things on it for work, but mostly playing with 3DP2A stuff.

With regards to the higher RPM with reduced radial engagement, here's how I think of it. If you're doing full slotting, the cutting edge is spending 50% of the time heating up in the cut, and 50% cooling down, so you need a low RPM to keep the heat down. At 50% stepover, it's 25% of the time heating up in the cut, 75% cooling off. At about 15% stepover, it's 1/8 of the time in the cut, and 7/8 of the time cooling down. This dramatically reduces the temperature of the cutting edge in the cut. So you can increase the RPM, which will generate more heat per degree of rotation, until the highest temperature in the cut comes back up to where it would be with your wider engagement. Then of course increase your feed by the same proportion you increased your RPM, to keep chipload the same. But then with low radial engagement you get to multiply by the chip thinning factor, and then you can really chooch.

I tried material libraries once in the 90's and decided it wasn't practical. Aside from drilling type tools, I recalculate the cutting parameters for each cut with HSMAdvisor; the ideal feeds and speeds will change with the depth and step of each cut, which makes the stored values not useful. Drilling type tools have stored parameters for the material they're most commonly used in, and I recalculate for other materials.

If you set your origin to the top center of the stock, you could use the exact same program for the other side.

Hey, I had muli-axis training in 2001. I should be good, right?

A cheap digital microscope works well, if you have to make a visual call, but the time to pull it out an look at it has a similar dollar cost to just swapping it for a fresh one and being sure. For smaller jobs I usually run them until they break, and use automatic breakage detection. For the longer runs I'm starting to get, I'm collecting tool life data.

If you convert the file, you'll find a 3/8" endmill is processed as a 0.375mm endmill, not a 9.525mm endmill as it should be. At a minimum, you'll have to manually generate the equivalent tool library in metric, select those tools, and check all your speeds, feeds, depth cuts, and stepovers. Then pay special attention to thread pitches.

As you revise and improve your programs, follow a revision naming / numbering system for both your Mastercam files and NC files. You can record which NC file versions were used on which lots of parts, so if a problem with a part is later discovered, you know exactly which program made that part; you might have already fixed it in the next program revision. This also helps you to backtrack if a program change doesn't work out as hoped.

I encounter this on 3 axis programs for an array of a few dozen parts. I suppose one could put a "point" operation with forced toolchange just before the op to be transformed.

Ditto. I just made some Coons surfaces yesterday to make a smooth flowing continuous surface on some undercut channels. Could be the old-dog-new-tricks thing but I've never had good luck with Net surfaces.

Sounds like the short path is training the night shift operator, until they can pass a gauge R&R test.

You can get add-in port cards if the box doesn't natively have one.

I'm pretty sure V8 was around '97 or '98, and parallel port HASPs (though they called them serial port). If you jump through enough hoops it looks like you can install Win 98 on an almost modern AMD computer:

If it's modular, I'd like to remove the touch-screen i-pad dashboard (ribbon) and go back to knobs and buttons (drop down menus with simple, sensible, access keys (not hotkeys).)

Threadmilling can also make a pipe thread that will actually seal, without requiring goop or tape. A tap will always leave a step where the flutes stop.