I haven't seen either of my machines be accurate to the backplot time over programs longer than about 20 minutes, but it's entirely possible I don't have something in Mcam set up quite right.

personally, I suggest waiting for it to hit the website

I have no idea what the brand I have actually is I guess, just a loose cutter that's laying in the drawer. I'm guessing the ones from McMaster-Carr that are "router bits for aluminum" (McMaster) would probably be the Onsrud cutters, or similar.

I think we've got a 5 horsepower spindle on there at the moment. It had originally shipped with a 10, but that went down a couple weeks ago so the tech came out last week and temporarily swapped it out with the 5. I'll take a look at those (again). I think I have a 1/4" onsrud o-flute cutter sitting in my tool drawer, and I know I'd looked into Onsrud cutters previously.

3-axis. The tech for the machine was here last week doing some repairs and he told me people have had plenty of success machining aluminum on their machines, but I neglected to ask him about surface finish or overall quality. I'm expecting an email from him later this week, so I'll have to ask him then. I'd imagine the way you hold the piece down would have a big impact on the quality as well, and I just held it down with toe clamps for a quick test.

I would think he means something like if you select a toolpath on the screen/part, then it would highlight the toolpath in the ops manager. I'm thinking similar to the way that in an assembly in SolidWorks, if you click on a part, it highlights that part in the feature tree. Of course, he could be thinking something totally different, but that's what makes sense to me

I don't think I can go much less than about 12k. The endmill I was using is relatively long, probably 3/4" flutes or so, although I tried multiple cutters. I'll have to check on those settings on the control. I think better geometry might help too, since there's quite a few segments in the quick sample piece I wanted to cut.

cruise control nothing, this is our busiest time of the year!

Yeah, I've got a mister setup

I'm trying to get into using our CNC router to compliment our mill a bit, so I tried actually machining some 6061 aluminum with it today and the finish didn't come out nearly as nice as I'd like. There seemed to be a lot of tooling marks on the floor of a pocket, and a heck of a lot of chatter on the walls. I tried multiple 1/8" cutters, a single flute straight, a two flute helix, and a four flute helix endmill and they all came out with similar results. I tried doing a parallel spiral-clean corners as well as dynamic milling. They all seemed to have quite a bit of chatter, which in part I assume is from the router not being nearly as rigid as something like a VMC. I was running the machine at 20k RPM, and had it set for 200ipm but I know it doesn't get anywhere near that since it takes a little distance for the machine to ramp up to that feed. I'm sure part of it comes down to getting feeds and cut depths right, but I tried multiple ways, from 0.150" deep to 0.020" deep, with a 10% stepover and using a 2D contour as like a 0.005" finish cut on the wall which didn't make much of a difference. Does anyone have any recommendations for machining blocks of aluminum on a router like this and getting a decent finish? Tooling, feeds, fixturing, I'll take any advice I can get. Thanks in advance!

Well I have the handheld rotary cutter, but I need one that mounts into my CNC router's tangential knife system. I'm planning to ask a tech when he comes later this week as the company we ordered the machine from shows them on their website, but has always told me they don't make the holders yet...stupid. I've just been putting a masking material down on top of the fabric, applying vacuum, and cutting with a drag knife through that masking material. Works extremely well.

ooo, we should get one. Run it through our network and anyone can watch the machine run, not to mention good videos on our site. We'd probably put an HD camera in there though lol

It's a similar idea, and would probably work. We ended up ordering the one in the picture. Hopefully I can design a holder for it, and if nothing else, get similar blades made at a tool shop here in town.

Does anyone know where I can find a pizza wheel style blade that's fairly heavy duty and would work well on a CNC router knife system? We don't have a holder for one, nor can we find one anywhere, but if we had a blade supplier we might be able to make our own holder. Something similar to this would be awesome:

well, SP5.0 is still Early Visibility I think, but it shouldn't make a difference if it's 5.0 or 1.0. Especially if X5 can open 2012 pre-release files.

Odd. I'm on X5 MU1, and SW2011 SP5.0, and I have no problems opening a solidworks file in MCam. Heck, X5 even seems to open SW2012 files just fine, which is a bit unexpected. Maybe because 2012 is still in pre-release?

I'll have to take a look at that. I know darn well we're not pushing our tools/mill nearly as hard as they could be. Something tells me we could cut our production times in half if we pushed them at all. I don't think there's a single tool we run at more than 60ipm--except on the router, where I regularly hit 600ipm with the kinves

I believe there's only the regeneration/calculation of certain toolpaths that use multiple cores. The rest of the program is entirely single core.

Hey now, it's all we've got! And it's a good little machine for the work we do

Yup, I checked the runout and saw how bad it was, fixed that. Now the probe is calibrated as close enough for the work we do. We don't have a night shift, or even a second shift, so if it breaks, it's either me or our normal machinist that breaks it, and I know when that happens. At least now I know how I need to calibrate it though, and it should make him happy that I checked it and got it set up properly for him to use however the heck he wants. Thanks for the tips.

Well, for 99.999% of the stuff we do, we've only got to be within a couple thousandths, nothing particularly critical (yet). I've got the probe calibrated to within X0.0004, Y.0001, and Z0.0004, based off an indicator and a few trials, so I think that's more than close enough for what we do. Heck, when it did the ring gauge diameter I ended up with 2.00009 on a 2" ring gauge. Close enough for the celebrities we make crap for I appreciate all the help and suggestions.

Oh I have no doubt the machine itself is off a bit, but for the vast majority of work we do that's ok. I just wanted to experiment with the probe and learn some new things with it to see what it's capable of, and figure out what more we can do with it in our limited field.

Really? Even though the manually explicitly says to calibrate it off the ring gauge?

Thanks for the pointers. I figured that part out from the manual. The calibration cycle completed and the numbers look a LOT better. Tried to check the ring gauge and now the damn battery is low! One thing after another lol

many times, and I've read through the manual a half a dozen times. I think I've figured it out now though, we'll see in a few minutes.