Seems to be working!

Seems to be working!

Patience pays off!

What speeds, feeds doc and woc are you using what tool?

@Paul_Shaw Everything is still kind of experimental, but I think I was cutting at about 12K rpm. Feed was slow, but I don’t know what it was. I used a 1/4” ballnose bit. Everything went fine (except the bit was too big for some of the detail. At the end I experienced some more of that binding.

@George_Allen I know I’ve dealt with binding on my adventures in DIY CNC. I can say it didn’t always go well for me either. I scrapped two machines over it. But by the third or fourth one that I built I was really careful. I wanted it to work. What I’m saying is binding is a very real issue to contend with. I imagine a lot of builders have to deal with it. Some might just get lucky? Something being just a hair out of whack can do you up. It don’t take much.

It wasn’t binding, I discovered. The flexible coupler on one of my table motors broke.

I also experienced binding issues. Never did resolve it completely before I tore down the machine to rebuild. I was dealing with about 5 feet of x axis, and dual y motors and screws. My next build im starting now im seriously considering only using a single y screw. Not sure that will make anything better, but it will allow me to use 4th axis for other things.

I actually used one of the cam wizards that mach has for drilling holes yesterday on one of my extra aluminum plates I had. It was the first time I was able to precisely space the holes to line up with the holes on the end of the extrusion. I think I’m going to redo a couple of my plates.

I think I’m binding I was experiencing before may have been related to the coupler issue as I think the motor wasn’t exactly in line with the lead screw. I’m going to see if recutting the mounting holes for the motor improves results.

@George_Allen just how precisely a CNC has to be put together is a topic that is not normally discussed. But if you think about it if you want a machine that is a certain accuracy then the machine itself has to be built that accurately. We normally want an accuracy of close to a thousandth of an inch with XYZ CNC machines. Building a big old machine to that tolerance is a bit of a thing itself. I’ll just say this I didn’t use a tape measure to make it happen. I actually used a pretty pricey gage block set. Though there are other methods. But if you have long gage blocks they’re not a bad way to go.