There’s Something About Knobs and Buttons

Got some photos from CNCCookbook reader Kelvin V of the custom CNC control panel he built for his router. Very cool:

More control panel pix on the CNC Control Panel Page…… Read the rest

Engineer, Heal Thyself!

This is a fascinating article that came to me by way of MAKE Magazine who found it on UK site theEngineer. It involves an engineer in the UK building his own aortic prosthesis to overcome a condition known as Marfan syndrome, an inherited disorder that affects the connective tissue of the body. It was causing this fellow’s aorta right below the heart to expand like a balloon to the point where it was at risk of popping and causing a fatal heart attack. The doctors gave him a choice of either risking the sudden catastrophic heart attack or undergoing surgery to replace that section of aorta with a mechanical valve that would lead him taking Warfarin for the rest of his life.… Read the rest

Too Much Stickout Can Ruin Your Day (And Your Cutter & Job!): Use G-Wizard to Check It

Somewhere early in my machining background I internalized the virtues of minimizing tool stick out. I remember very early purchasing a set of screw machine length twist drills just because they were shorter and less likely to flex than the jobber length many are used to from the hardware store. I could see and feel the difference quite easily. I also don’t buy many long cutters–they cost more money and you’re tempted to hang those lovely flutes out there too far.
But, not everyone has had the evils of excess stickout ingrained.… Read the rest

Knowledge-Based Machining Comes to G-Wizard!

Knowledge-based machining comes to the G-Wizard Calculator with the latest release 1.026. The Cut Knowledge Base is now live. It’s a special purpose database where you can record your experience with various cutting parameters as an aid to tuning up your feeds and speeds.
“Knowledge-Based Machining” is a popular buzzword in the high-end CAM market today because it involves capturing a shop or machinist’s best practices and making it easy to reuse the best practices on all jobs. Every time we make a cut, we have the chance to try something new and perhaps learn from it.… Read the rest

CNC’d Art From Old CD’s and DVD’s

Hat tip to Make Online and Google Image search for vectoring me onto this cool little CNC project:

They’re made by CNC’ing old CD’s or DVD’s, which gives them that shimmery look. That’s a cool scrap material for doing art projects.… Read the rest

Custom Tool Data for a Sandvik R390 90 Degree Face Mill

G-Wizard has the ability to import custom tooling data so you can set it up with your manufacturer’s recommended surface speed and chipload. Our list of downloadable tool profiles is available on the download page. It can make quite a difference. For example, here is a 2 1/2″ wide cut, 0.050″ deep in 4140 with the Sandvik R390 and CT1030 grade inserts:

614 rpm and 14.7 ipm…
The default facemill data for the same cut would have us using running 217 rpm at 9.8 IPM. That’s a material removal rate of 1.2 versus the 1.8 ci/minute with the factory data.… Read the rest

New WordPress Theme and Migration Plan

I notice the traffic over on the WordPress blog has been picking up steadily. Just so you know what’s up with that, it’s a copy of the content from www.cnccookbook.com’s blog presented with more traditional blogging software (WordPress). The original blog (and I can’t tell which one you’re reading so the wording is awkward!) has each page hand crafted in Dreamweaver. That’s great for the project or cookbook “recipe” pages, but we don’t gain much doing that for the blog. Hence I want to ultimately quit hand crafting blog pages to free up more time to do the other stuff (can I get a “Yay”?).… Read the rest

Nice G-Wizard Mention from NYCCNC

Got a nice mention of G-Wizard as well as some insights into how this machinist likes to manage his tooling for his CNC mill:
 
Thanks to NYCCNC for the video!… Read the rest

10 Questions You Could Answer If You Had a Cut Knowledge Base

First question you might like to answer is, “What the heck is a Cut Knowledge Base?”
Simply put, a Cut Knowledge Base (hereafter referred to as a “Cut KB”) is a way of organizing your notes about what worked and what didn’t to make it easy to answer all sorts of interesting questions. All good machinists keep notes and try experiments to see what they can learn and improve on. If you’re doing a job that involves a manufacturing a lot of parts, you have an opportunity to do some experiments on successive runs to try to improve your productivity and drive down costs.… Read the rest

Got My Enclosure Page Up…

I’ll be tracking my Mill Enclosure project from its own page. Here is the overall rendering:

IH CNC Mill Enclosure rendering…… Read the rest

From the Archives…

Just for fun, and because there are quite a few archives, I thought I’d add the link above where you can click for a random CNCCookbook post. This is by no means are whole archive since it ties back to my WordPress.com site that has only the more recent postings. It will grow steadily over time, though as I am committed both to writing new posts (natch!) and to backfilling the WordPress archives until I have it all moved over. Do keep in mind that WordPress is an experiment right now and the www.cnccookbook.com page remains the main event.… Read the rest

Got a Good Start on a Pig Trough…

But, seeing as how I don’t own any pigs, I decided to call it a chip pan for my mill enclosure instead. After getting a note from a reader that got me to looking over my enclosure idea notebook, I couldn’t resist getting started. Just a couple of progress photos for now, but I’ll write up the whole thing once it’s done. My brother runs a picture framing business, so he handles the woodworking end of our projects… Takes a pretty good sized trough for the IH Mill!

You know they’d be happy in that chip pan!… Read the rest

The Short List for Online Marketers at Small Businesses

My other blog is about entrepreneurship in the technology startup world (not to mention Cloud Technology, Mobile Computing, and Social Networks) and I’m a serial entrepreneur who has done 5 companies so far with a sixth (right here, baby!) underway. As such, I follow a lot of small business and entrepreneurship resources–I subscribe to nearly 200 blogs for that information. A number of our readers here at CNCCookbook run a manufacturing business of one kind or another. Some of them are running job shops while some are manufacturing their own products.… Read the rest

Amazing Projects with CamBam

Some of the lower end CAM programs are capable of some amazing work. Here are some samples done with CamBam: A 747 made from aluminum. Very cool 3D work! Watch chassis with “tabs” for fixturing… Watch part… There is the part installed… CamBam scored pretty well on the CAM Survey (below). I’m starting to see why!… Read the rest

Idea Notebooks

CNCCookbook is nothing if not one big idea notebook, but I keep special pages I call idea notebooks for things I haven’t built yet, but expect to and want to collect notes for. I’ve got a number of different idea notebooks including: CNC Control Panels: What should be on your control panel? Coolant Collars: A handy way to dispense flood coolant that clamps to your spindle. Mill Fixture Plate: Makes modular fixturing and setups a snap. Souping up a Drill Press: Something to be productive on while your CNC mill is chugging away on its own.… Read the rest