We started with saftey rules wright away. Our lab provided us with:
- glasses
- protective suit
- earflats
- gloves
- face mask
We always kept our hair tied and in the hood and we always took of any jewellery. We learnt to always be at least 2 people
and to keep a saftey distance while the shopbot is working for additional safety reasons.
This is the axes's knob:
This is the key to turn on the head spindle:
This is the vacuum and the dust collector
1)Removal of the vacuum block: turn the knob clockwise while holding the vacuum block utill it's loosen.
Unscrew this bolt to completely remove it from the head spindle:
2) Endmill features:
- flat
- diameter 1/4 inch
- 2 flutes
- downcut
3) Endmill insertion: after inserting the endmill in the head spindle while one person should hold onto it while
the other person uses these two special wrenches:
N.B. During the Endmill insertion procedure, the head spindle MUST be turned off.
As a reminder of this, our Lab attached one of the special wrench to the key that turn on the Head Splindle.
A a consequence, to use the special wrench you need to extract the key, but you can extract it only if the head spinde is turned off.
To tighten the head spindle and secure the endmill push the two wrenches away from each other (while to loosen it pull them towards each other):
N.B. Be careful to insert the endmill around 1 cm away from the flutes.
4) Reposition the vacuum block following the reverse procedure
After moving the head spindle away from the work space desired on the machine to avoid collision, put the wooden board on the sacrificial layer and secure it using screws and washers (to balance the pressure of the screws). Advise: to smoothen the insertion use some hand soap. This procedure is to secure the board and also to avoid boardening of the wood.
Once the machine settings we're done we turned the key to start the engine of the spindle and we moved to the computer station to
start the worm up procedure:
After approximately 15 minutes of worm up we set the x and the y in the work space we
wanted to cut:
So we opened the g-code software VCarve. As a first thing we set the work surface (thickness, hight and width of the material), when the previw shows up on the screen we checked that is was like the one we had on the machine.
For this test we drew 3 squares (12cm x 12cm)
We then created 3 different files for the settings of the endmill to test the feed rate from the upper "tool - tool database" menu. We decided to test 130 / 105 / 80 inches per minute:
1. Tooltype: is type of cutting tool, we selected endmill.
2. Diameter: it's the diameter of the endmill, ours it's 1/4 inch.
3. Pass depth: it's how deeply the endmill cuts in one pass.
4. Step over: the inches the endmill moves on the x and y axes.
5. Spindle speed: it's the endmill rotation speed.
6. Feed rate: it's the speed of the cut (inches per minute).
7. Plunge rate: it's the speed of the endmill on the z axis.
8. Tool number: it's the number of the flutes.
In the upper right corner we clicked on the "Toolpath" menu, and then "Profile toolpath" to have an external cut:
As a first first thing we set the start depth at 0.0 mm (because we want the machine to start cutting at origin of the z) and then the cut depth at 15.5 mm because our board is 15 mm deep and we wanted to be sure the cut was right.
We selected our tool (with the feed rate changes) and then we set the passes to 5 (3 mm each is the safety limit):
After that we selected an outside climb cut as shown in the image above. Then we added two tabs to the toolpath to make the object stable even when it's completely cut: tabs are just little pieces (10 mm width x 1 mm deep) to keep the cutted piece of wood anchored to the sacrificial layer. Clicking on "edit tabs" we were able to position as many as we wanted on the toolpath. The number and the position of the tabs depends on the shape to be cut, on the size and from the distance relationship with the other pieces on the table.
When all the settings are ready we pressed "calculate" to get the toolpath. This way we are able to see a preview of the selected toolpath.
The exact same procedure was made for the other feeds we wanted to test. We saved the toolpaths in 3 different VCarve files.
After this, we proceded on the Shopbot Control panel.
In addition to our test files, we created a separate 2D profile cut toolpath, changing the cut dept to 1 mm and setting a fake Z on the Shopbot control panel by clicking on
"Zero"-zero z axis.
air_cut from Olivia De Masi on Vimeo.
The software is just a control panel to move the axes and to import the files to be cut.