Psychotic Break Build - Aluminum Frame 

Glad it helped!

I MIGHT get around to this video, but it's an Oenida V3000 3HP dust collector.

Thanks!

I covered this in the video. Profile cuts are slower and the cut quality is much worse. I would have saved minutes versus the adaptive tool paths. In terms of recycling the chips, the whole piece was about $10 worth of metal, so the recovered cost of the aluminum would have been minimal and not worth the time.

thanks!

Others have asked this, the profiling is much harder on the tools and the mill, plus you have to go a lot slower. I chose to just clear out all the material instead, it didn't take that much more time.

I'd have to dig it up, but it's an amana signle flute ZNR coated. Check amazon, nothing special.

That stuff gets gummy when it gets warm though, right? I would worry it would let go if it go too hot. I'm really liking the painters tape and super glue method.

Clogging I found is caused from heat (wrong feeds/speeds) and cheap bits.

I have the 2.2KW spindle from them. Check out my overview video, I show my setup. It's just the NEMA34 and 2.2KW spindle.

There's a lot to explain here so I'll try and gloss over some of the details. If the part didn't have any cutouts at all, it was about 3 pounds PER part, which is over the entire weight budget for the bot. The pockets on the underneath side saved around 20% I believe. So without those, it would have been nearly half a pound overweight. They were significant in weight savings without having to make the structure unnecessarily thin. This allowed me to keep the width of the frame relatively high, maintain 0.25" overall thickness, but achieve the weight I needed. I didn't do any simulations or generative design. That was the original goal, but with all the videos and side-projects, I ended up not having time to do the math, I just went by intuition, and what I felt was appropriate.

I need to leave SOMETHING for people to complain about ;-)

Definitely worthwhile if you're expecting multiple runs of a part. For small runs or one-offs, though, yeah, you may be wasting time improving a process that was good enough.

@@RobertCowanDIY thank you very much

Jep I know but it's just so much fun to make it as fast as possible and see I fly true your material

Relief cuts are a must to extend to life of our tool no matter what material you use.

Ha! I've been thinking about a way to have a 'quick release' that allows me to easily add a table for vertical operation, but I haven't thought of a clever solution yet.

This is true. The full HSMWorks is now bundled with the monthly, 1-year, and 3-year Fusion 360 subscriptions. Its a great deal if you have Solidworks.

I don't. I should I guess, but I've not done casting and it's not really all that useful for the stuff I do. Cast materials are significantly weaker and not desirable for my projects.

I just used a spot drill for this, works good enough.

Sorry, I don't actually use Fusion360! I use a really old outdated version of the CAM in solidworks. I'm not sure how helpful that would be. There are some really good channels that talk about Fusion360 CAM though.

Yes, there are, but I really like the way you explain what your are doing and why. Thank you great job@@RobertCowanDIY

@@jamescullins2709Thank YOU!

I disagree. That's the dust shoe. It's loosely attached. There's VERY little risk of injury. Your circumstance may have been very different.

Yeah, I've since increased the RPM, especially now that I have my coolant setup working properly now.

This is a loaded question. Is there play, yes. Is there also play on my Tormach? Also yes! It really depends on what you're cutting, what tolerances you need to hit, and what you're trying to do. For MOST projects, I find it accurate enough. I can (with a little bit of tweaking) accurately make bearing bores and cut parts with relatively close tolerances in aluminum. For wood, it's more than adequate for anything you'd need to do. I find that with a little bit of extra work, I can make parts equal to that of the Tormach, but the surface finish is lacking due to a lack of rigidity. It's a large machine and there will be some play, but if you can work around it, it will do what you want.

Thank you Robert. My plan is to use it 99% of the time on wood and wood products. I will be using it to machine cabinet parts, surfacing large table tops, and 3D carvings. Thank you for your time and thoughts on the avid machine. Looks like I will placing my order within the next few days.

Check the description.

I have the standard configuration, which I guess is 8". The higher you raise the gantry, the more flex it will have, so they advised me to stick with the standard configuration.

@@RobertCowanDIY Thank you so much for. replying!!!! Im in the process of building one of my own. I have about a 1/3 of the parts but your videos alone have answered sooo many questions I have had so thank you!!!!

Because the base is MDF. With any moisture, the MDF swells. I now have a fogbuster and metal table for the front third of the router.

@@RobertCowanDIY that seems like a really good reason 😄 you got awesome results dry cutting! I’ll try it as well

Cheapest option is just a broom and brushes . Hear me out metal will not fly up in the air like wood usually does so no dust to speak of however for chip clearing you can use compress air or of possible a fluid flow And cheap schopvacs handle chips good enough preferred one with a metal bucket most wood collector's sucks the chips true the fan and vacuum cleaner does not do that the fan (mostly) does not grind the chips

I buy the aluminum on eBay. It's REALLY easy to find. There's a seller in Colorado, so I get it in 1-2 days. But it's really common. Aluminum is much shinier. Try polishing HDPE! But seriously, aluminum is significantly more rigid and doesn't break as easily. Metal is in general a lot stronger than plastics, but heavier.

If you use plastic in a battle bot, it will snap a lot easier than aluminum, aluminum tends to chip more than plastic.

Robert Cowan oh I see. That makes sense! Thanks for the help!

I don't think that metal would be likely to "bend" in a battle bot. Put if you bend 3d printer filament or Plexi glass to far, it will snap.

@@RobertCowanDIY and not as brittle as some plastics so it just maby sandwich alu-palstic-alu

Yep, the 2.2KW spindle from Avid.

You're not wrong, but when you're cutting at 100+ IPM, it doesn't take very long. Slotting is much slower than an adaptive tool path. The chamfers too the most time by far.

I get them from amazon (amana tools). I also like the ones that CNC Router Parts (Avid CNC) carries, they work well too.

You're not wrong. I think my biggest mistake was carpet tape. I should have just used painter's tape with superglue. I was getting shifting with the carpet tape and that was a big problem.

@@RobertCowanDIY I think they are the same, tbh the screws you used would have been more than enough to hold 6mm plate down, knack is not to over tighten. You would only need tape on thinner material where a higher risk of bowing might ocurr and the part wasn't suitable for vaccuum holding. It just appeared to me that as these were through holes and not pockets, thus a profile cut was the better operation. Sad as I am, I have even cut more parts out of bits left over, something you can't do with a pile of chips from pocket operation. End of the day the part looked great so no matter, job done!

Check my channel, I have many videos on my router. It's from Avid CNC, so avidcnc.com.

Yeah, same question. Seems like contouring would be faster without any disadvantages, except you’d have to remove tabs.

I mentioned this briefly in the video, just plunging into the material and cutting a slot is just a sloppy toolpath. It loads up the flutes way too much and you get a poor finish. You are engaging the material on all sides, so the chips have nowhere to go. You have to run a lot slower doing this and usually need coolant, so running a really fast adaptive toolpath was actually a bit quicker for me.

The lowest RPM is 8K I think. The RPM range on this is just much higher. You CAN drill holes just fine, they just require a pecking operation to do properly.

Well, it's good that you do have heard about it.

Outsourcing CNC has gotten VERY reasonable. There's no need to actually own the CNC unless you just want to tinker at home like me.

I've addressed this like a million times. I can cut a LOT faster with a tool path like this then plunging through and doing a contour. Also, then you have to worry about tabs, or the free piece in the middle, etc. It didn't really take any more time to cut it the way I did, and I didn't have any of the negatives of cutting a slot.

@@RobertCowanDIY When you cut a profile, the only cut you make is the same as the last cut you make when grinding away all the rest of the material. It is much faster Tabs: You use tabs when the fixing is in the waste material - which yours isn't. Those centre pieces are held with perfect stability up to the final fraction of a second when they come free. The double sided tape is more than up to the job of coping with that. And even if the tape doesn't stick, they won't move more than a fraction of an inch. The outer profile is easily managed with a couple of screws in the waste on opposite diagonals. This has the added benefit of preserving the lower left corner for height probing the chamfer bit. I'm prepared to bet that nobody else would approach this job the way you have.

I explained this in the video. It takes the same amount of time to just remove the material this way. Full depth cuts like this are time consuming and leave a terrible surface finish and evacuating the chips is tricky without flood coolant. And no, I am not a machnisist.

@@RobertCowanDIY , MAKE helical entry and then 0,1 feed on tooth

to avoid break of pice on outging edge leave 0,1 mm at the bottom then break manualy an breakpice .

I was still learning the machine back then. It was one of my first bigger projects. I've figured out the right feeds and speeds. I wasn't trying to hide anything. I have full control over what video clips end up in my videos, why would I include a clip of my trying to just talk louder? I could simply edit the sound, remove that clip completely, etc.