Browsing articles from "March, 2011"

Great Video Series from Hoss on Tramming a Small Mill

Mar 4, 2011 // by Bob Warfield // Blog, Techniques // 3 Comments

Squaring up and tramming their mill is often a puzzle for new home machinists. Hoss makes it look easy in his great video series. Here is the first one:

Hoss Trams a Mill–Pt 1

The other parts are here:

- Part 2

- Part 2B

- Part 3

Those videos are taken from his CNCZone G0704 series as he converts a Grizzly G0704 to CNC. If you haven’t come across Hoss before, he is a must-read. His G0704 thread is great, but still in progress–he has CNC’d and added a belt drive conversion to the spindle, but he is still in the middle of his power drawbar and eventually a toolchanger.

Look for his other threads on CNCZone, and be sure to visit HossMachine, his web site where he has gathered up all of his many fantastic projects. If you’re trying to convert one of the machines he has already gone through, you’d be well advised to purchase his plans and perhaps even one of his kits to save yourself a tremendous amount of work!… Read the rest

MeshCAM: Great Ease of Use in a 3D CAM Package

Mar 1, 2011 // by page.lysupportadmin // Blog, Software // 4 Comments

Most machinist I talk to go through the same experience the first time they try CAM–total bewilderment and frustration. Everyone has this idea that you create a 3D solid model, load it into CAM, push a button, and out pops a finished g-code program. If only it were true!

Instead, you generally have to wrestle with the solid model until it imports properly, and then you have to tell the CAM program where the parts of interest on the model are and what sorts of toolpaths to apply to them.

Imagine my surprise when I loaded up MeshCAM CNC Software, stuck a solid model in it, and discovered that with very little trouble I could (drumroll please): push a button and get a g-code program. Cool beans!

Here’s how it went:

First, I went and found a suitable 3D model I had done in Rhino3D. MeshCAM imports STL files for its 3D models, so I exported one from Rhino. Here was my Rhino model: