I would permanently mount sensitive bubble levels onto the table so that you can detect shifts right away. Survey-grade bullseye levels are accurate to about 10' (1/6°). Also the aluminum frame is probable the biggest culprit to dimensional changes by far. The operating temperatures should be kept within a few degrees Fahrenheit or so. Aluminum has extreme thermal expansion. If you're getting tolerances in the thousandths across eight feet, you must be looking at holding about 1.5°F in aluminum.
You guys make this ‘Sconnie proud. Very impressed with the attention to detail you exhibit throughout this project. Wish you success, and on, Wisconsin.
You guys need to meet with Mike Patey who also builds his own planes? Would make a great video? Just a thought, you all are incredible, keep up the great work!
Very cool to walk through the process. I recently chatted with a woman who swears by avid cncs and owns several for her business. She was trying to convert me over to buy one to replace our current table, and was telling me about a site she worked with to develop a ready-to-go package for avid users that gives a really nice looking bt30 spindle. The site's called cncdepot.net and their spindle package is on my shopping list. Manual tool changes drive me nuts having to touch off each time. Even having the draw bar with no atc makes life soooo much easier.
Hi guys. Please could you elaborate a little more on what matching/cutting bits you use for machining solid epoxy carbon Fibre boards as well as what feed rate and spindle head speeds you you use. We use our CNC router for cutting out parts from prelaminated vinylester Fiberglass boards with a foam core and seem to go through bits. The bits get chewed up real fast from the resin?
Hey, Great work! Fellow AVID owner here with exactly the same HDPE and cross braces as yourself (although we cut a vac table into it) Can I ask what the cool looking 8020 cabinet with what appears to be air tanks underneath is for?
I've got an AvidCNC, too (although I put ClearPath servos and an HSD spindle on mine). The HDPE is a cool idea. I bet a piece that large was expensive. Did you really find an improvement, though? I would have thought over the course of one job it wouldn't change that much. The additional braces are interesting. I store a bunch of lumber on the bottom cross beams, making it quite heavy, but I do see the frame move a lot with every acceleration change. Do you find they help a lot?
Rick, thanks for watching! You may not see much change in a single job. It becomes more important for machining larger sections that need to fit together that you can’t machine all in the same timeframe. The bracing helps. Anything you can do to further increase the rigidity for the machine is a plus. It was definitely worth it for our parts.
Greg, thank you for watching and the comment! These precision numbers are the same ones provided by Avid CNC on their website. Once we got the machine setup we spent a long time getting it dialed in and then setting up a process to ensure it remains dialed in over time. One way we verified machine capability was through machining a variety of parts and checking their dimensions against the prints/CAD.
We had considered it and ultimately decided the vacuum table wasn't a good fit for us at this time. Vacuum tables are costly, require additional electrical power, can be loud, and can also lose vacuum due to an unexpected power loss. With running larger mold patterns in the middle of the night while we weren't there, we didn't want to worry about the potential vacuum loss.
DarkAero, Inc Right on. My best friend runs all the CNC parts for a company called Rugged Radios. We actually machined the vacuum “table” from aluminum w/criss-cross channels for gasket material to seal. It definitely has its place. I’m not a machinist just thought I’d chime in.
Gotta ask, you guys being engineering students at UW, were any of you in the band? Seems there’s a high percentage of band members who were in the engineering school. My son, Mike Orear, AKA “Porty” played trombone 2009-2014. Three Rose Bowls. Lost the games, but our band kicked butt! 😁👍🏻
Charles, thanks for watching and for the comment. We actually did a video on stall of the DarkAero 1. The link is here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gjNPEDBeiTI.html