When it’s cutting across in the beginning it sounds like a siren. Neighbors must think the nukes are falling hahaha. Seriously though, this is like ASMR for the industrially deranged. Good stuff.
haha yeah it can get pretty loud. Gets even louder when it's cutting steel. Sofar doing sound checks walking around the house when it's running it doesn't seem too bad, but I'll get some sound absorption material on the metal garage door at some point.
Seems like you could tweak your VFD settings quite a bit? I've a little 2kw Chinese spindle on my router and it gets up to speed in about 1 second i think? I also made it do a little active breaking (although I've not connected a breaking resistor, so got it doing something like a 1-2 second stop. Don't recall exactly) Faster spindle speed up also implies better control under a heavy cut.
Bryan you can definitely up the chipload on that ball mill. I've been using a 4mm 2-flute uncoated carbide ball mill at up to 0.06mm chipload. Try 16000rpm @ 1280rpm. You could up your stepover a little bit too.
The results I was getting with the ball mill with my settings didn’t give all the great of a finish. It could have been due to heat or just smearing the chips because the chipload was so small. I’ll try your settings next time I run it.
Looking back at the results in the video it definintly gives a better finish when it's cutting on the side (at the end of the video) vs the bottom (beginning). Probably due to the bottom does not have a good cutting attack angle and not a constant chip load. Maybe cutting such a shape like this again would give better results starting from the bottom centre and going up each side in an upwards direction.
@@BryanHowardyeah, the theory in cutting upwards is that the outside flute already cut away most of the material.. Working downwards you are cutting mostly with the narrow centre of the tool
@@BryanHowardyou can't go too wrong with alu, but probably 24k is a bit high of a surface speed for a 4mm ball? Perhaps not so much though since the effective diameter is much smaller? Personally I notice that too high a surface speed gives a cloudy finish in alu
Not sure What kind of cam program you are using but fusion deals better With higher stepovers in Aluminium. Was running 6mm stepover at 4000mm a minute Feed the other day .endmill was a 12mm 3 flute at 0.13 feed per tooth 😂
Yeah for the 6mm single flute I normally run them at 2.4mm stepover. This stubby one would probably handle 3mm stepover with no problems depending on the depth. In this part I cranked it way down because I was planning on going straight into the ball mill and wanted to cut the steps close. Ended up adding the 90 degree parallel last minute so I should have brought the stepover back to norms and let the parallel job do more work.
I accidentally ruined my 3d printed (PETG) stepper mounts on a longer wood carving test. Once the steppers reached thermal equilibrium the heat was just too much and the mounts deformed. Had to dial the stepper current down quite a bit. I will probably print some from ASA filament.
Yeah for sure I could see that with steppers if the amps are set too high. I'm running servos but even though they are rated up to 400w each, without any load on them they'll draw hardly anything and stay cool. Unlike open loop steppers that are drawing constantly. I wonder if closed looped steppers have a feature to draw less current on the drivers.
@@BryanHoward Yep, that's a big advantage of servos. My open loop stepper drivers have an option for setting the idle current. It can be set at half or full amount of the set current.
@@BryanHoward awesome, thank you! I do think that rings a bell from one of your really old videos, now that you say that. Really great stuff you’re putting out, I’m always stoked when I see a new video from you! Please keep going!
Yeah and at the beginning when I had the overrides on by accident, it was pushing 4x the chip load without breaking the too. I should have left the feed at 200% and just brought back the rpm as it was handling the cutting fine. There are some obvious video speedups of 20x and you can tell when I do that in the video.
What're your thoughts on the 12k vs. 24k on that 3D adaptive? I don't know all the optimal load per tooth and feed stuff well enough to ask questions about that yet but it does seem a lot happier at higher RPM if you can move the machine fast enough to keep up with the required MRR or whatever it is?
The overrides were a mistake that I temporarily had set. The most important thing is feed per tooth. Changing the RPM and or the feed will affect the feed per tooth.
When it’s cutting across in the beginning it sounds like a siren. Neighbors must think the nukes are falling hahaha. Seriously though, this is like ASMR for the industrially deranged. Good stuff.
haha yeah it can get pretty loud. Gets even louder when it's cutting steel. Sofar doing sound checks walking around the house when it's running it doesn't seem too bad, but I'll get some sound absorption material on the metal garage door at some point.
Cool part and video. Thanks for taking the time to record and upload.
Seems like you could tweak your VFD settings quite a bit? I've a little 2kw Chinese spindle on my router and it gets up to speed in about 1 second i think? I also made it do a little active breaking (although I've not connected a breaking resistor, so got it doing something like a 1-2 second stop. Don't recall exactly)
Faster spindle speed up also implies better control under a heavy cut.
Yeah that might help with some of the cutting in steel too.
Bryan you can definitely up the chipload on that ball mill. I've been using a 4mm 2-flute uncoated carbide ball mill at up to 0.06mm chipload. Try 16000rpm @ 1280rpm. You could up your stepover a little bit too.
Yeah for sure I think it would give a better finish as well. First time using a small ball mill like this so I had no idea.
The results I was getting with the ball mill with my settings didn’t give all the great of a finish. It could have been due to heat or just smearing the chips because the chipload was so small. I’ll try your settings next time I run it.
Looking back at the results in the video it definintly gives a better finish when it's cutting on the side (at the end of the video) vs the bottom (beginning). Probably due to the bottom does not have a good cutting attack angle and not a constant chip load. Maybe cutting such a shape like this again would give better results starting from the bottom centre and going up each side in an upwards direction.
@@BryanHowardyeah, the theory in cutting upwards is that the outside flute already cut away most of the material.. Working downwards you are cutting mostly with the narrow centre of the tool
@@BryanHowardyou can't go too wrong with alu, but probably 24k is a bit high of a surface speed for a 4mm ball? Perhaps not so much though since the effective diameter is much smaller? Personally I notice that too high a surface speed gives a cloudy finish in alu
Not sure What kind of cam program you are using but fusion deals better With higher stepovers in Aluminium. Was running 6mm stepover at 4000mm a minute Feed the other day .endmill was a 12mm 3 flute at 0.13 feed per tooth 😂
Yeah for the 6mm single flute I normally run them at 2.4mm stepover. This stubby one would probably handle 3mm stepover with no problems depending on the depth. In this part I cranked it way down because I was planning on going straight into the ball mill and wanted to cut the steps close. Ended up adding the 90 degree parallel last minute so I should have brought the stepover back to norms and let the parallel job do more work.
I accidentally ruined my 3d printed (PETG) stepper mounts on a longer wood carving test. Once the steppers reached thermal equilibrium the heat was just too much and the mounts deformed. Had to dial the stepper current down quite a bit. I will probably print some from ASA filament.
Yeah for sure I could see that with steppers if the amps are set too high. I'm running servos but even though they are rated up to 400w each, without any load on them they'll draw hardly anything and stay cool. Unlike open loop steppers that are drawing constantly. I wonder if closed looped steppers have a feature to draw less current on the drivers.
@@BryanHoward Yep, that's a big advantage of servos. My open loop stepper drivers have an option for setting the idle current. It can be set at half or full amount of the set current.
Also what material did you use for the 3D printed parts that held up?
Petg. Stronger than pla but more importantly won't deform due to heat if you use it as a material to hold stepper motors. Stepper motors get hot.
@@BryanHoward awesome, thank you! I do think that rings a bell from one of your really old videos, now that you say that.
Really great stuff you’re putting out, I’m always stoked when I see a new video from you! Please keep going!
I love it! Is this video full speed?
Yeah and at the beginning when I had the overrides on by accident, it was pushing 4x the chip load without breaking the too. I should have left the feed at 200% and just brought back the rpm as it was handling the cutting fine. There are some obvious video speedups of 20x and you can tell when I do that in the video.
What're your thoughts on the 12k vs. 24k on that 3D adaptive? I don't know all the optimal load per tooth and feed stuff well enough to ask questions about that yet but it does seem a lot happier at higher RPM if you can move the machine fast enough to keep up with the required MRR or whatever it is?
The overrides were a mistake that I temporarily had set. The most important thing is feed per tooth. Changing the RPM and or the feed will affect the feed per tooth.