Official Luthiers Forum!

I just wanted to highlight the CNC Subforum and the help that exists over there. Last spring I bought a CNC machine because the price was one that I could not turn up. I do not have any formal CAD background and certainly ZERO CNC experience. Over the summer I did some maintenance on the machine and figured out the mechanical aspects of it. I also needed to order things like collets for the router and timing belts that were worn. Once I had everything up and running I could stall no longer so asked around in the CNC subforum and purchased the appropriate software. That was the easy part! With the great and generous help from these forum members I am plodding along! THANKS GUYS!!!

To shorten things up I just wanted to show some progress. Tonight I just completed the first radius dish on this machine!

I have been proud of my radius dishes but this machine will just make them that much better. Here are some pics:

Here is the machine I have. It is a Canadian made Precix, built in 1999. It has a 49" x 49" cut area.



Here is a 25' dish in the process of being milled



This is a picture of the controller where you can see the work being done graphically



And last is the finished dish. This took about an hour of run time to complete



Although I could rout them in about a half hour by hand before, it was WAY messier and I was also unable to do anything else. With the machine I can prepare other things while it cuts these dishes.

So, back to the value of the CNC subforum, for those who do not visit there often. There are great discussions on CAD for those that like to be able to draw out their parts, we talk about vacuum fixtures and where to get these parts, we talk about cutters and feed rates and other stuff like that. Also, a few guys are building their own CNC's either from kits or by pieces. So pop by and check it out, you may find some useful things to assist in your non-CNC processes.

Shane

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Canada

Congrats on getting good results. Looks like you ended up with a great machine. One question though. Does your dust shoe work as well as your picture would have us believe or did you vacuum the table clean before you took the picture? If it does work that well I'm sure everyone would like to get a closer look at your setup.

Bob

It works that well Bob, but each pass that I make on the Machine is only .040 inches so it is not chipping the mdf as a router process does. I am using a ballnose cutter so I need to take small step sizes. Still I do really like this method over my router sled on a spinning table method as it does decrease the dust load in the shop. The shop vac though is the noisiest part of the operation!

Shane

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Canada

Maybe I need to rebuild my system. I've got a Delta dust collector hooked up with 4" hose. My shoe is shopmade but it has something closer to 3 inch long bristles on the brush. It keeps mdf dust out of the air, but I end up with a pretty thick layer of dust on my table. Looks like shorter bristles might be the way to go, for 2.5D work anyway.

Congrats again, I'm looking forward to seeing what you make with it.

Bob