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Home built CNC Mill - Gonna make a 1911


StraightUp_OG

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Anything will help, sounds like your using it exactly as it was designed.

This is just an academic discussion I think. It didn't sound to me like you were having a problem.

Keep up the good work!

I love what you're doing with that mill, work way beyond its appearance.

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Motor on mini mill and super minimill has a 5hp/200v induction motor. It is TEAO, totally enclosed air over. The motor is enclosed in a sheet metal shroud and we use a 300 cfm axial fan.

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Oh and the motor runs in wye for minimill and fixed delta for super minimill.

When running in Delta, the current capacity is increased by a factor of 1.732 which makes it a 8.66hp continuous rated motor, 17.3hp peak.

Our motors have class H insulation which can run to 180 degrees celcius prior to thermal shut down. Of course we have our limits set lower than that.

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Anything will help, sounds like your using it exactly as it was designed.

This is just an academic discussion I think. It didn't sound to me like you were having a problem.

Keep up the good work!

I love what you're doing with that mill, work way beyond its appearance.

Thanks!

I appreciate the discussion, a tad deeper than I have been, I'm up to the challenge!

I just watched a video of the EC-400 HMC in action. What a machine!

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I have video and I'll grab some screen shots of the CAM software.

Because the top of the slide is not parallel to the bottom rails you can't clamp it in a vise without using a single point contact. Thus the aluminum rod is used to create the point contact.

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I watched your video and I can't tell if the grooves were cut out in the last step to leave flat bottoms in the cutouts or if you flattened the bottoms. I really liked the grooves in there. That looked almost animalistic.

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So here is the CAD model in Solidworks.

SlideConcept20-Works.jpg

Here are the rear pockets and roughing passes, done with HSMWorks, a Solidworks intergrated CAM program.

roughing.jpg

Then the finish passes, done at .005" stepover.

surfacing.jpg

After the initial roughing with a 1/8" square endmill, already done in the photo, you come in and do a semi-finish with a ball end mill.

IMG_4242.jpg

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Then the finish passes are stacked right next to each other with .005" spacing. I should say that my CAD model was based on me using a .040" diameter ball endmill to do the finishing required to get the small radius on the floor on the internal pockets. But I didn't have one handy - so I just used my 1/8" ball endmill and dealt with the larger radius which sometimes chatters a touch creating some of the roughness on those rounds.

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All Done

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Edited by jid2
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I have a dumb question. Why did you put the bottom of the slide against the moving jaw instead of the fixed jaw? I would have thought the other way around would be more accurate in theory.

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It will be that way for the other side. These cuts don't need precision with respect to other features and the moving jaw is still pretty good, within .001".

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I wish you had stopped after the 1/8 ball end mill cuts as well. I liked the grooves. It looks like a layer has been peeled off and you can see the inner workings under the top layer.

This is going to be a bad ass open gun. It it yours?

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Yeah lots of good gun smiths use manual machines, but there are a handful of guys with CNC machines as well. It'll be interesting though because access to CNC is really getting easier as you can see in this thread.

Material remaining is .055" in the thinnest main section, but it really varies. Someone asked the weight, Solidworks has it at 10.2 oz, I'll see what it weights in real life soon, the machine is busy cutting the 2nd side right now as I type. It's a cool 17,723 lines of code.

SlideConcept20Xsection.jpg

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Pretty happy with this thing so far, still need to engrave, sand, polish and finish. But it's looking awesome. You nailed it on the cyborg thing, I started with very geometric panels and didn't really like them. So I started to make them more organic then the idea of a rib cage with tree root like structure kinda started to appear and that was the basic idea.

Might have to post some pics in the gallery!

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Yeah lots of good gun smiths use manual machines, but there are a handful of guys with CNC machines as well. It'll be interesting though because access to CNC is really getting easier as you can see in this thread.

CNC mills are cheaper than ever, but the tools and skill to do what you are doing is a lot more rare. Just having a CNC machine doesn't mean you have top-shelf CAD/CAM and have the ability to model and modify a slide like you have.

Speaking of which, what was your process for modeling the slide? Did you blueprint it and build the model from scratch?

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I hate you all! Last night I ordered a LMS 3960, vice, tool holders, indicators, dials, and a few other pieces....

Congrats! You will have a lot of enjoyable hours with that. :cheers: Just remember - CNC not used correctly is just a faster way to make scrap! :o

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