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Dans RV8
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Date: 9-25-2011
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Number of Hours: 0.10
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: CAM and Milling
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I want to machine some connector slots into the bottom of the avionics tray. The DB-xx connectors are hard to make by hand. I do have a $400 die to cut DB9s, but it probably is a little light for the material I am using.
So... It is a good day to learn how to take my new CAD skills to the factory floor.
I spent several hours finding and evaluating CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) tools to convert 3D models into G-Code for the mill. After looking at 6, I came back to MeshCAM, where I had started. It is pretty easy to use and seems to have all the features. They are having a special, so I bought it and skipped the evaluation.
I am getting better at CAD. I designed a generic parameter driven DB connector.All I have to do is change two variables to make any connector from DB9-37. Cool.
I used MeshCAM to create g-codes ofa DB15. I then analyzed the output code to see if it made sense. The first passes generated hours of code make the cut. Since I was cutting through the material, I only needed to cut the edges, not all of the material being removed. The 3D input generated a lot of extra cutting. I found that by importing 2D I got just the g-code I wanted.
The next hurdle was the milling machine itself. I have only used it once to cut the sample part that came with the machine. And it came out in mm instead of inches.
I spent hours trying to figure out how to get it into inches. I found one screen in Mach3, the control program, that looked promising - but it had a big warning - don't do that... So I got creative. I scaled up everything 25.4 times. That worked, but it was SLOW. The feed rates were in MM and I couldn't scale them.
In the process, I crashed the machine and broke a mill bit.
I gave up for the night and went to watch TV. And surf the forums. They didn't have a lot of posts, but they had mine dead-on. So, at 11:00 I went back to the shop and found that the "don't do this" setting was in Inches and not MM. I had read that the machine IS metric. So I chan
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