We're actually looking at purchasing a small spindle and mounting it to our painting robot. At least, that's the current thoughts if we can get the robot running the way we want. The Haas office mill might be too big of a footprint for what I was thinking, but certainly an option. Chances are, we'd need some sort of probing, but I imagine we could do it without probing as well. Now we're being asked to remove between 0.006" and 0.010" on a total of 14 parts per product before we paint them. That's what the customer wants anyway, certainly isn't likely to happen unless they really want to pay! Especially considering some of the parts would probably have to be fixtured multiple times since the surfaces aren't exactly flat. I've got to figure out how to reduce that to just a few parts now, that should be fun.

you can bring up a num pad with one of the buttons on the 3dconnexion mouse that you could click the numbers with your mouse. It's under the button programming tab. It's also got a setting in the num pad to auto hide or not. Still not exactly ideal, but you can do pretty much everything without the keyboard then.

at the moment it's a huge issue, but hopefully won't be an issue within the next few months.

It doesn't sound like Tormach has the accuracy/repeatability we need, according to an email from them. Has anyone worked with these instead: http://www.mdaprecision.com/index.php/

I was guessing tight tolerance would cost more, that's why I didn't think the Tormach machines seemed like they cost enough to hold the tolerances. We are only cutting plastic for now, but the tolerances are still pretty tight, I think we've got to be within a thou consistently to keep everything so it'll fit back together. In some cases, we might just be taking a couple thousandths of paint off instead of the plastic, so we wouldn't want to touch the plastic at all. I know our hurco could do it, but it's only got an 8k spindle, and is tied up pretty much all the time with other jobs. We had been looking into Datron mills because they're apparently really accurate (and way expensive), but they take up so much room that I don't think they're necessary for these parts we're trying to modify. The biggest one is only 3"x4"x1.5" at the moment, and the volume of parts we're likely to be doing is high enough that it'll tie up any machine for probably the next 6 months to a year.

Pete, Do you have any experience with those? They seem like they're too inexpensive for a machine like that.

Does anyone have any ideas on a commercially available benchtop milling machine with high accuracy? We're looking to remove like 0.003" around a 3D profile from some plastic parts before we paint them, so a small table top machine seems like it'd be the perfect fit. We'd need to be able to have fairly high accuracy and repeatability to take the same amount off each time and have a good enough surface finish that lines wouldn't show through the paint. That tells me we'd need a relatively high RPM, especially when some of the parts would probably require cutters 1/32" or smaller. We just saw something like this at a demo (http://www.intelligentactuator.com/tt-table-top-robot/), and we'd get a motor to mount to the Z-axis, but I don't know if something like this has enough repeatability to do what we want. Any input would be appreciated.

There's around 8 of us going Monday and Tuesday to look at all sorts of tech. Mills, Lathes, tooling, lasers, stamping tech, all sorts of stuff. Should be a blast.

I think there's an autocad app that might open them, not sure how useful it is. I haven't found a good app for viewing 3d models on the ipad, and the edrawings app doesn't seem to run that well on the original ipad

I called for quotes on Datron a year or so ago, and no, they certainly weren't cheap. As for rack and pinion, it would depend on what kind of accuracy you're looking for.

our AXYZ brand router has those specs, but a bigger bed. I think there's also quite a few others that have those specs for quite a bit less than ours costed. I think Onsrud makes some, and thermwood, and couple other companies that I can't think of. Not sure if any of those have an ATC option, and not all routers are ballscrew driven, so keep that in mind.

you'd think so, wouldn't you? He's pretty old school though, and very set in his ways. because I don't buy the tools unfortunately, our machinist does. He gets most of them from McMaster and orders what he knows rather than trying anything new. I'm only running the mill for a week because he's on vacation, so I don't want to change anything without letting him now

I'll have to double check the spindle speeds and see if I can convince our old machinist to run them faster. It doesn't happen on every part, but it's certainly annoying to know that it has the potential of happening and always when we're not around to stop it before it ruins the part.

I'm having problems with our 1/2" endmills plugging when cutting aluminum. It only seems to happen on one particular place in the part, which is cut out of a 12x12x1/2" plate, and only happens when we cut the center 8"x6" halfway through. It's a full width slot, so that's certainly not helping matters any, but we do two other full width slots with that cutter on the same part that go completely through, and the cutters never seem to plug on those. This leads me to believe it's an issue with our fixture, which doesn't seem likely since the center block is held in with 4 screws and two dowels, with 4 more screws holding the outside pieces in. It also doesn't happen on every single plate, usually just when I'm not paying attention to the thing running. We've got plenty of coolant from two directions hitting the cutters, so I don't think it's getting hot, but it's certainly not always evacuating the chips. Spindle speed is 3500, feed rate is 45, so a feed per tooth of 0.003". We're also ramping in, so that should be helping right? We're using 4-flute SGS tools with a Ticn coating. Any ideas?

what kind of fixturing do you do? Just rely on the vacuum, or do you have other methods? And is it just me, or does the Onsrud website absolutely suck to find anything you want to order?

It certainly sounds to me like you've already hit that max speed. Depending on how the machine is set up, I don't imagine that your router is actually hitting that type of feed rate before it has to switch directions on the smaller parts. I know our AXYZ router takes a bit of distance to ramp up to the specified feed rate.

what kind of thicknesses are you doing? I've tried 0.025 and 0.016" aluminum sheets in the past on our AXYZ (Pacer) router and hadn't had that good of luck, but I've found some new ways that might help, if I ever get the chance to test them. The biggest problems I had with cutting the sheet aluminum on our router was keeping them held down with the vacuum, and the edge finish. Granted, we were doing some parts that a vacuum hold down isn't exactly ideal for, since they were only about 0.5" wide in most cases. However, I've recently started working with a product called "Vilmill" that looks like it'll help with the hold down quite a bit. It's basically a 0.010" thick fabric, with an adhesive on it that's activated by the heat of the cutting action. The adhesive helps with holding the parts down when they're cut through, and then it peels off without leaving any residue. I think it will help with aluminum quite a bit, but I've only used it to help with plastics so far. I haven't run aluminum in quite some time so I can't really help with feeds/speeds much. I was running close to that 750sfm and 0.003 chip that you're running at now the last time I tried any aluminum. The Onsrud cutters definitely seemed to give the best results, but they still didn't meet our demanding quality requirements.

I've had MSE on my work machine since I started, and it's never caused any problems. Certainly not with MCam or SolidWorks. I've had some issues with graphics not playing nicely, but I think that's my graphics card telling me it doesn't want to work anymore.

well, it's the most up to date driver that SolidWorks supports, so it should (and used to) work fine. It's not the most recent one for the card, but I've had bad experiences with updating the drivers before they're supported by SW.

I'm having some issues where occasionally when I try to change the views using the standard views toolbar, only like half or two-thirds of the viewing area actually changes, and that usually results in nothing being shown on that part of the viewing area. After this happens, I usually can't adjust the zoom or angle or anything with the mouse wheel or my SpaceExplorer. I don't load any extremely intricate models, in fact most of them are only a single part and doing only simple chaining, so it should certainly be able to handle changing views at any time. Has anyone else had issues like this? I've got a FirePro V8700 in my machine, and this glitch has been happening on and off for a few weeks now.

I'm stuck with a single 30" monitor, there's been quite a few days when I could use a second one, or even a 24" or something. Our print guy has 3 or 4 monitors over there at the moment, along with a second machine at the other end of his table to run another printer. I've got a SpaceExplorer that I absolutely love, especially for programming chains with MCam.

well that sucks. Guess I'll have to go back then. I use the mouse more on MCam than anything else, especially for how much it helps on chaining.

I was running the latest supported release and might go back to it if this doesn't work. The version 10 beta lets you use the mouse literally with any program (except MCam apparently). Works pretty slick with google chrome!

Is anyone using the 3dxware 10 betas for their 3d mouse? I've got a SpaceExplorer USB and was for a while but then had some bugs pop up that I didn't feel like dealing with. Figured I'd try it again and it looks like the 3D controls don't work with X5? They're all on, and the buttons work fine, but moving the controller cap does nothing to the model on the screen. It works fine in every other program I've tried, just not X5 (or X6 by the look of things).

I did, but I threw most of those away yesterday