CNC (Lasers, Routers, Etc)

Bandwagon said:

That knot will be covered by opaque blue resin sometime this week.

I'm not worried about the shitty wood I'm using at all right now. I just don't wont to fuck with nice stuff while I'm learning. I'm pretty damn close to switching over there.

I really just need to figure out stain and resin. I have to stain first, but not sure what trick to use to plane/sand down the clear resin afterwards, without stripping off the stain on the top layer. So that's my biggest hurdle right now.

On the resin, I need to make sure I can pour clear resin with no bubbles. I know what I'm supposed to do on that and have a vacuum chamber and everything, but haven't actually tried it yet.

Once I have those 2 things figured out, I'm switching to nice wood.

Click to expand...

Just keep in mind wood variance can cause different cut qualities and issues. Usually it makes for better cuts because the wood is more dense and doesnt disintegrate. It's usually a case of feeds,speeds and bite size differences due to the denser material.

Bandwagon said:

Any advice to have it come out of the machine with a finish on-par with like 400grit sandpaper?
1/4in ballnose with 8% stepover feels really clean to the touch, but I'm not sure how it'll look once stained. Are cushion-y sanding pads a thing on CNC? it would have to work for the 3d topo, not just flat stuff.

Click to expand...

I've never seen a project come out that didn't need to be sanded for a professional quality, especially if you're applying a stain or varnish. It's just part of the process.

I've never seen any type of bit or attachment that will do what you ask other than a diamond bit for acrylic edge polishing. They may exist, but I'm assuming if they do they are a huge pain in the ass to deal with or I would have seen them at some point in the demo room.

You could get some round sandpaper pads, normally used with a lathe, and try to fix them to your router bit and run the same pathing again but 1-2mm higher (depending on the thickness of the pad)? Not sure how well that would work but in theory, it could.

For resin, make a couple of practice batches / pours first so you don't waste a big amount for nothing, its really depressing to do so. If the final piece is bigger than the vacuum chamber, you'll also need some form of heat gun / blowtorch to get some of the bubbles out. One other idea to consider is to leave the bubbles in if its meant to be a lake/river/stream to add to it. If they are mid-thickness its not terrible, as long as they aren't surface level which would feel shitty to the touch.

whoo said:

I didn't know this thread existed until Bandwagon mentioned it. I'm a long time woodworker, but fairly new to CNC machines. I'm very familiar with 3d modeling and vector drawing. I'm learning the ins and outs of toolpathing and optimizing the input to get the output (gcode) i want. Definitely a learning curve.

I have a traditional woodworking shop where I make furniture, and I recently bought a Legacy Maverick Pro (manual tool change), mainly using Vectric Aspire 11, although I'm more familiar with other software for modeling. I'll use it primarily for furniture and it's lathe feature.

Who is active in the thread and what do you guys do with your stuff?

Click to expand...

I worked for a large CNC company but have recently moved on to new things (even though they are trying to get me back, lol) I still dabble but Mainly in 3d design and 3d printing these days.

I'm trying to workout a deal where I can get a machine and then I'll be making tutorial vids for the company. So maybe you'll be able to harass me on YouTube soon.

I even helped a friend build his own machine from scratch but he never uses it. Thing needs to be at my place.

I'm sure if you sift through this thread and a few others you'll spot things I've made and given away.

whoo said:

What type of CNC did you make at your former company? Industrial? Big 7 axis type things? Or something less dramatic? Just curious. And thanks for the reply, good luck with YouTube. Let us know... Id watch your vids

Click to expand...

I worked for multicam.

We made a but of everything, but mostly 3 axis machines.

Routers
Plasmas
Lasers
Water jets
5 axis waterjets
Knife cutters
Rotary indexers
5 axis machines (not many of these)

I started in tech support and moved into engineering. I was heavily invested in the documentation, software testing, production support, tech support support and management of the internal website.

Most of my tenure in engineering was spent creating our ultra fast knife cutter the Celero and Core8 software.

Bandwagon said:

Alright boys, give me some ideas for home setup, low cost dust collection. I've been in rough shape for the last week because I was only paying attention to the big chips and didn't notice how much fine dust this thing was putting off. I set up the shoe and hose that attaches to the router, but I don't think I want to turn that thing on again until I build an enclose that I'm confident can handle the fine dust. My garage is attached to the house too, so I'm worried about any of that stuff getting in the house and into my daughter's lungs.

I'm going to grab one of the vent fans from the fire department tomorrow and do some PPV with it while I blow out my whole garage. I've got a layer of dust on everything

Click to expand...

There's a ton of options just depends on how much you want to spend. The biggest issue I've seen, at least from our machines was how well the dust boot is designed, and if I remember correctly you have a 3D printer so I'd work on designing one out of a high grade material if you can. We had some dogshit ones that finally got fixed in the last few years but man they were bad. Good ones are designed with air nozzles inside the dust boot that will help blow the dust that gets caked up inside away. Be very careful whether you buy or design one. If too much shit gets caked up in there you will burn burn up your spindle, burn down your house or both. I once ruined a 30k dollar spindle on a machine we were doing R&D on in 20 mins because the dust hood got blocked and I had no idea it had occurred. I thought for sure I was getting fired over that one, lol. Another time a fire started inside the boot and you could see it getting sucked up the tubing and into the 55 gallon drum FULL of fine dust.

I remember going to help a customer with a machine and they had no dust collection and about 30 of our machines. I walked into the factory and it was fucking snowing wood inside the building. On top of that It was some weird mecca of hot ass chicks too. They had no A/C and no dust collection and it was mostly super hot Latina women wearing tiny booty shorts and wife beaters, It was very difficult to concentrate. I'm still baffled how they kept from burning that factory down.

Bandwagon said:

Alright boys, give me some ideas for home setup, low cost dust collection. I've been in rough shape for the last week because I was only paying attention to the big chips and didn't notice how much fine dust this thing was putting off. I set up the shoe and hose that attaches to the router, but I don't think I want to turn that thing on again until I build an enclose that I'm confident can handle the fine dust. My garage is attached to the house too, so I'm worried about any of that stuff getting in the house and into my daughter's lungs.

I'm going to grab one of the vent fans from the fire department tomorrow and do some PPV with it while I blow out my whole garage. I've got a layer of dust on everything

Click to expand...

One other thing I forgot to mention, do not skimp on that shit and I'd be terrified to run one without it. They serve a dual purpose of stopping the momentum of the bit if it breaks at 30k+ rpm.

We had one come off at 50k rpm, shoot 30ft across the shop and impale a guy in his upper thigh. His keys in his pocket stopped the bit from piercing the major artery in his leg and killing him. I already had a lot of respect for the machines but that scared the shit out of me, I refused to run them after that without a dust boot on the machine. They had several holes in the wall from where bits/chucks had come off before from the bit breaking, someone not tightening it correctly, using the wrong sized collet insert or spindle failure.

Stumbled across a pic of that machine we designed and built that's just collecting dust in a garage, thought I'd share.

Bandwagon said:

Hekotat - if I want to "stamp" text into an uneven surface, like writing "Lorem ipsum" at a -3mm depth below the material surface where the previous toolpath leftoff.....is that called "rest machining"? Or is there another name for that if not?

Click to expand...

I can't remember if there was a name for it in our software. It just knew where the surface was if you put it late in the process.

The other option would be to do all your other work then have a second file that you run with the letters. You'll have to re-set surface on the top before running it and ensure the part doesn't move or shift. Leave vacuum on or clamp it down.

Should be able to do it all in one file then turn off layers and output the code for each file if that makes sense.

Bandwagon said:

The problem with that approach is that it doesn't work with uneven surfaces. Thats the part that keeps tripping me up.

Picture a mountain. If I do a rough pass while carving out a mountain, I want text stamped into the surface of the mountain, which is not going to be a flat plane that I can zero to.

Click to expand...

I dont know the software you're using so I can't give you solutions there. But one work around would be to do each letter to the depth you'd want individually. So the top of the mountain at .12" and increase the depth as you move down the slope.

Tedious but it should work and you should be able to see the results in the preview.