This vid was a talk I presented remotely to the Microwave Update conference in Vancouver. I've probably used abbreviations and jargon that are aimed at an informed bunch of techie microwave radio nerds. I'll be making dedicated videos about the design and manufacturing process, but if there's any extreme jargon or acronyms/initialisms, please feel free to drop a comment with a timestamp and I'll try to shed some light on what on earth I was banging on about.
Don't worry Neal, there are a bunch of us that did not notice any of those abbreviations as they are in our daily alphabet soups. My friend and I have built each our laboratories, while going up only to a few Ghz, with HP/Agilent, Tek and I suspect some R&S soon, to experiment to our heart's content. I imagine we are not alone in your viewer bunch. Now did you throw in your AI assistant for that CNC setup? We haven't heard of her? Anywho, I wonder how much of an RF lab you have, if any...
@@2oqp577 I have a basic setup, with an HP specan that goes to 26.5 GHz, plus external mixers to get me to 50 GHz, an Agilnet E4406A, a few E4433 sig gens, 20 GHz counter, lots of power meters and heads up to 70 GHz, a Fluke 8845A 6.5 digit DVM, several AC millivoltmeters, a range of slotted line, sliding shorts, sliding loads, directional couplers, the usual LiteVNA/PocketVNA and a few other cheap VNAs, calibrated SOLTs to 50 GHz, some old HP VNAs (pre-8510), plus heaps of cavity wavemeters, rotary vane attenuators to 76 GHz, vacuum pumps and associated bits, 15 kV variable DC supplies and all the detritus from 50+ years of hoarding. Also a few frequency standards, Rubidium, well-aged and thermally/physically isolated quartz, backed by a couple of GPSDOs with decent antennas. I only have three 42U racks in my study, and there are still a few spaces in there. Having been close to a few Keysight PNAs in labs I've visited, I'd really like a decent modern VNA that can go beyond 24 GHz, but that needs significant funds. Unless Keysight want to lend me one and some range extenders and standards?
@@2oqp577 I wasn't sure that the esteemed audience at Microwave Update was quite ready for AIMEE. I am sure the snarkmeister will return as normal service is resumed
It certainly felt a bit of a risk, but since Titan got involved, and they got more national sites, it feels a lot safer choice. I miss through-spindle coolant and a wash-down hose, and should have gone with a proper Renishaw-style probe and a 4th axis drive, but my funds were limited.
Alec has MUCH better hair than me. I already had a Kallax unit and stole the background idea from Rob at VidIQ before I'd seen Alec's channel. Alec's lighting is also WAAAAY better than my cheap LED strings pinned to the rear and illuminating a curtain made from bed sheets.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves don't fall into that trap, 4th is great to have, but 5th is waste of money for this sort of thing, not to mention that 5axis cam cost, that is extra $$$ in Fusion, along with 4th, and work envelope will decrease drastically with the addon 5th solutions in a machine that wasn't designed as 5x in the first place unless you _really_ need that, it is better to design parts that don't need that complexity and added investment
I have three 42U racks of electronic testgear, and more on the way, but I'd love a surface grinder and a CNC-converted lathe. The vacuum PVD and sputtering gear is almost ready to roll, and the electrochemistry bench is fully equipped. I even have all the necessary regulatory stuff in place to buy concentrated acids and other controlled chemicals. Had to install a special cabinet for those. It's very yellow.
Man how different the world is. I'm in the middle of deep drawing some sheet steel from a veggie oil drum as part of a dial pan for an old clock I'm building by hammering out the sheet on hand made dies and here you are, twice my senior, whipping out some of the latest in manufacturing advancements. You're a complete madlad and not a cent was wasted on that CNC machine!
I'm also a woodworker and do a bit of blacksmithing and sheet metalwork and steel fabrication, but nothing good enough for public consumption. I just love the whole "making things from ideas in my head" process. I was taught how to use hammers to move metal around when I was 17, and that muscle-memory is still there. I come from a long line of agricultural workers, ditch-diggers and carters, where having a wide range of obscure skills was seen as something natural and vital. I'm a half-decent dressmaker, I can knit, and I'm a good commercial quality willow basketmaker, Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers of the City of London, no less! Sadly, I wasted my entire life doing horribly technical things with computers, comms, data networking and cybersecurity in the pursuit of funds to buy toys. I could've been a contender.... ruclips.net/video/efHzGxEzDQA/видео.html
@@MachiningandMicrowaves damn, you're even multi-talented! I've always wanted to try basket weaving, if at the very least to put all the invasive vines to use. Don't sell yourself short on what you put time in. If it gave you joy then it was worth it. If not, at least it paid for other things. Computing and electrical componentry has never been my strong suit so I applaud anyone with the talent to even apply those for career purposes. In my case, I grew up poor and mum was very disheartened at how many things were not working correctly in her life, so in my spare time I learned ho to fix things by reading books at the library about wood and metal working and that sort of spiralled in to life skills I've since applied in several jobs over the years. It turns out a lot cheaper to fix things when you have the tools to fix them and raw materials are so abundant people just throw them out if they're not the right shape. I absolutely love the idea of putting skills to more community efforts so I occasionally volunteer at a repair shop that mostly deals with consumer stuff. Although just like you, I also love the process of putting pencil to paper and turning those hasty scribbles in to something useable and practical, or even just working with a half-baked idea and having the hands to bring it to the real world like wood carving or engraving.
@@classydays43 I was homeless for a while around 1982. I was sleeping in the directors' boardroom of an abandoned oil, coal and salt warehouse on a disused dock in Hull. That taught me some very useful lessons about surviving and even thriving. My mum describes her life when I was young as being "poor as a church mouse", and I had to learn a lot of make-do-and-mend skills that most folks wouldn't need to pick up. I was definitely in the "posh" tier of homeless, I wasn't sleeping in doorways, and the warehouse was safe and dry. I made a little money using my furniture-making skills to produce fake antique pine furniture in a workshop in the Fish Meal factory. The lads in the fabrication shop there let me use their huge metalworking machines in return for biscuits and cakes. I picked up a lot of skills during that time, and I'd completed most of the useful parts of a four-year electronic engineering degree, and the rest is history. I lost interest in electronics for work and went back into computer stuff just in time for the boom in business computing. I knew a lot of esoteric stuff that others didn't, and that paid what felt like serious money!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves wow what a story! Amazing how far a little kindness from the men in that shop has stretched. They could easily write a movie about that
I remember saying a couple of years back, "why don't you get a CNC machine Neil?" Glad you took my advice 😊. Anyway, well done. That ticks many boxes. Money - can't take it with you. ✅️ He with most toys wins ✅️ Massive increase in your Al chip collection ✅️ More time for sleep (I know you don't) while your toys beaver away making you stuff. ✅️ Phenomenal purchase and video Neil. Looking forward to seeing more!
My first exposure was in 1983, but apart from a bit of 3D printing, I've never used any CAM systems. After a month, I was able to write my own postprocessor for Fusion to drive the SYIL mill as a vertical lathe. I've been coding since the early 1970s so that wasn't very hard.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yeah, the hard part is going to be learning all the "best practices" for machining and figuring out exactly what speeds/feeds your tools like for the materials you're cutting. Strongly recommend getting the aluminum-specific cutters. They will save you a lot of frustration from chips welding themselves to the bit, completely ruining your surface finish.
@@simoncleret I'm using mostly YG-1 and Korloy A+ lapped carbide end mills and high-rake lapped inserts, and DLC coated threadmills, plus some chip-splitting semi-roughers. Coolant is full-synthetic. I'm using some cobalt-HSS tools for plastics. Also using some worm-pattern drills for aluminium and some special brass drills.
Wow... Congratulations, man! Really stunning new toy... I mean... tool! 😃 Looking forward to see what you make next! Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
I love how they get squished longitudinally to give the appearance of superluminal velocities, except that's just the phase velocity. Still screaming especially violently of course
Ohhhhhh shiny new toys! (happily spending the kids inheritance?) I understood most of the words in your descriptions, but some of the sentences threw me! Keep up the good work!
Now that Project Narwhal (see the thumbnail for one of the components of that madcap scheme) is almost put to bed, I can get on with proper actual "making stuff" projects again. Being on the TV is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't pay well and the time investment is immense
Have you seen AvE's "town pump" CNC, ie:everyone gets a shot! 😬 Send him in a decent idea, he polishes up the prototype for you and sends you the sample plus the updated files for a sensible price for us makers, perhaps you might find yourself doing something similar? :) And he makes it available to his local friends, and they in return chuck in their big fancy equivalent priced tool, and once half a dozen of them got together they had a *serious* workshop :)
I sort-of do that, but the ideas are usually in the form of an antenna component or mount or something, so I run up a design and use Patreon/Kofi contributions to cover the materials and postage. At the moment, I'm very VERY short of time, I was up until 5am today working on something for an upcoming BBC2 TV program. Sounds like a great idea though. Several of the big Chinese fab shops want me to do sponsored vids, so maybe if they will offer a decent discount, I could work up a viable design and if it's OK, the maker could then order a batch from them direct with a discount code. Right now though, I need to catch up with commercial work to justify spending the grandchildren's inheritance on a killer robot
Now THERE's a channel I totally adore! The project for television has eaten every spare moment for several months, now I need to build my views back up so I can get back into a good publishing cadence and think about some collabs. I'm working on one right now, but it's part of Project Narwhal, so I can't talk about the details until the TV broadcast happens. I have two other collabs in the pipeline as well.
@@MachiningandMicrowavesI'll be waiting with baited breath! I was intrigued when you mentioned the similarities to optics, and thought immediately of* the software he shows on his channel. When you showed your roughing cut (fixture failure) I'd thought you were making a Fresnel lens.... My father worked in optics, radar and radio. I was always intrigued with synthetic aperture and other beam forming techniques.
@@jimurrata6785 Phased arrays and particularly mechanically-operated reflectarrays are on the agenda for next year, along with metamaterials and frequency-selective surfaces.
I have been doing some phased array Ku-band radar work recently. I am used to software that can cost $10,000. I got a quote from Ansys for their HFSS suite. I nearly passed out when they told me $100,000 plus support costs. Sometimes real world testing is cheaper. Even if it is tens of thousands of dollars.
I've always wondered how much the surface smoothness affects microwave emmitors and such, I know it's all electromagnetic radiaton like light is but is it as sensitive to roughness? 🤔
1/20 of a wavelength is just about good enough, similar to high quality optics. Even 1/10th wavelength works OK. Scattering from surface roughness is a definite problem as you get to wavelengths of a millimetre
Undermentioned advantages of CAD in my opinion - it scales between component and system level information; and the reduction in the cost of revision. I used to work in oil and gas infrastructure design. Database driven CAD was getting to the point where mechanical 3D design was being completed/ updated in relation to the process design so it was harder to make mistakes. I had to stop sketching even simple piping drawings by hand. It always seems like it’ll be fine, and then you get more information - 15 min to make one update in a computer file vs. a couple hours to redo a hand sketch.
@@JamesDriver40 Generating designs directly from mathematical representations was the main driver for me. Making an asymmetric secant-squared dielectric body or an axially-displaced ellipse body of rotation directly from algebraic equations adds immensely to my creative process.
I tend to sit staring into the abyss with one finger on the cycle stop button and another on emergency stop. The 12mm x 8mm slot milled into the moving hardened prismatic jaw of that Gerardi vice is a testament to how enthusiastic the machine can be.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves yeah, not watching too closely is the only real way to cope 😄. I find most of the time the first failure alert is an audible change. A small jaw tickle is a good outcome... at least in contrast to the alternative of bending machine parts!
I'd love to hear more about what you do with your parts once you've made them. What does the hobby entail? Is it Ham radio but at higher frequencies? Do you observe satellites?
@@qwertyface there are people who use satellites and of course there are quite a lot of amateur radio satellites. There is a Geo stationary satellite called QO100 with a transponder using an uplink at 2.4 GHz and a downlink at 10 GHz. I prefer to think of satellites as passive reflectors, so I bounce signals off the solar panels of the international space station and low Earth orbit satellites as well as aircraft. A lot of the transmission modes are designed to work right at the limits of what is possible using digital modulation. There's also quite a lot of digital television work being done and the satellite also support that. I also make parts for radio telescopes and particularly the people who like to monitor the satellites in the deep space network around 8.4 GHz. I'm also working on imaging radar systems. I been messing about with radio since I was nine years old back in the 1960s and it's kept me completely fascinated for all that time. But then Professor Hannah Fry has it exactly right. in her words, I am the biggest nerd she's ever met.
I didn't understand half of what you said here but as a machinist I did enjoy the CNC side of things. CNC mills are very expensive (as are all of the CNC range, second-hand or not) but wonderful machines, and I'm not surprised you are enjoying using one. Not familiar with Syril as a brand, but there are a lof of new brands around these days.
I first became aware of the previous generation of SYIL machines when they sent one to Naomi Wu, but then I saw there was a UK agent and the dimensions of the all-new X5 were just enough to get one into my machine shop with 13 mm to spare between the floor and the 8x8 inch oak beam above the door. None of the other low-cost (!) machines would fit, and the barn was thrown together with no foundations, terrible bricks and sandy mortar, plus it was cracked by the earthquake we had near Market Rasen some years ago. I like the way the SYIL is "Assembled in China" from parts that are from many countries. It feels like I could carry out repairs even if the supplier ceased trading. They made a commitment to maintain supplies of spare parts for all their machines long-term, and I thought that was a good sign. It's reasonably fast, reasonably accurate, reasonably powerful and reasonably priced. Yeah, I'd like a Heimle or something, but that would need a lottery win
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I'll have to check out the Syil range, they sound reasonable. Haas do some decent small CNC mills but still not cheap by any means. Heimle? Yeah, definitely lottery win territory. 😁
I couldn't fit a Haas through the doorway, it would have needed me to remove that lovely oak beam that I installed 30 years ago. The long-term costs of a Haas were a bit of a problem unless I was going to get a guaranteed level of income from job-shop work or one of the online brokerages like Xometry or Protolabs. I don't want to take on any long-term contractual support costs. I like that I can write macro code for the machine, although I'd like to have more access to APIs so I can write utilities that access the machine over ethernet. Probably safer if I don't fiddle though, and treat this as a black box that just works.
You could look into monocrostaline dimond tooling for mirror finishes on your dishes straight out of the mill. Don't get me wrong, I never used these (lack of an industrial cnc milling machine for starters), but heard some good things about them.
I've considered cubic boron nitride and PCD inserts for mirror-finish turning, but not for the mill. The costs are ludicrous of course. It might be worthwhile for experiments on 30 THz (10 micrometres) far-infrared that a number of experimenters in the UK are working on. I don't know if the 1 micrometre steps on the axes and spindle of the SYIL are small enough to make it worth going for diamond/CBN tooling. A real high-end machine has steps down below 100 nanometres, so there are no visible cusps. I think I need to work up to that sort of level of perfection very gently. Could be very interesting for vacuum deposition on to aluminium and copper machined surfaces
CNC machining is both challenging and satisfying, I am confident with this machine you will slow atrophy of you brain and live a longer happier life “making things”
I really need a 4th/5th axis and a Renishaw-style probe, but that is all really serious money and I'd have to do a lot of production work to help pay for the upgrades, plus the additional Fusion licence upgrades. Not keen on the idea of turning into a production job-shop
Here is the origin of the expression “one of,” as in the engineer sending a drawing downstairs with a note reading “make one of these, we’ll see if it fits.”
I'm sure it has already occurred to you but I've had a lot of success 3D Printing fixtures for machining. The combination saves a whole heap of time, cost & thinking! I'd be interested in more of a review of your Mill. I looked at Syil a few years ago - but didn't trust the reviews at the time. I ended up buying a used Bridgeport Interact. However, I'd still like something smaller & more modern.
The older SYILs were not brilliant, but these are made from decent parts from many countries, and the massive epoxy-granite frame makes a big difference. I'm using the Bambu X1C to make fixtures for the CNC already, see at 10:02 although I'm mainly making softjaws from aluminium, steel and Delrin. I'll certainly be using a lot more 3D printed parts for fixturing. As you say, it's a great shortcut and reducer of brain strain
Titans of CNC just had a video of aluminum machining on SYIL machine, using some fancy diamond bit, perfect mirror finish on a pretty organic shaped part.
Thanks very much for the heads-up. I haven't watched that one yet. PCD and CBN are not ridiculously expensive, unlike monocrystalline diamond. I was talking to my supplier about some boron nitride tooling last week. I'll take a look at young master Gilroy's offering tomorrow. Cutwel do sell single-crystal diamond tooling, but the price is right off the scale. I adapted a FANUC postprocessor for the SYIL to run as a vertical lathe, with tools in a gang fixture in the vice and the part in a chuck in the spindle. The finish using lapped carbide insert lathe tooling was pretty close to a mirror, so way better than needed for sub-1 THz parts, but I couldn't get chips to form, it was all stringy and caused problems with fouling the tool. Maybe I should have driven the tool harder and used a smaller corner radius. I'd draw the line at single tools costing more than $200 I think, but if they could do a 3 or 4 mm diamond tool with decent reach inside a non-circular cavity, with a corner radius, that could be very useful.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I think the material / product was called MCD, some monocrystaline diamond type material. Impressive results - but as you suggested, at a impressive price most likely :)
@@SarahKchannel The cutters from my tooling supplier are priced between 1500 GBP and 6000 GBP. Maybe OK for a university lab, aerospace contractor or high-end optics supplier, but a little outside my comfort zone right now. Still going to watch what Titan and his team have to say. Underneath the showmanship, they are solid.
1:03 I always hate going through research papers, they really don't like getting to the point and there tends to be endless fluff before you actually find what you are looking for.
I have a curated feed of academic papers that weeds out some of the rubbish, but only as a source of ideas and inspiration. I can skim-read academic papers rapidly, but even so, getting to the really interesting stuff is painful. Some PhD theses are very worthwhile as sources of ideas, but a lot of them are not really deep dives, despite being 100 pages long. I tend to follow the papers done by interesting lead researchers, who put their name to lots of interesting papers by their colleagues and postgrads
@@MachiningandMicrowaves yes some are really useful and some topics are easier to sift through than others, I'm rather technical and don't have issue finding the info I need in most cases but when I need to dive into specific topics like designing simple optical systems for telescopes, it's very hard to find good explanations on these relationships.
Yeah, I'm going a bit American about using pounds instead of tonnes/tons. It's a fair bit over 2000 kg. Costs to date including tooling, holders, vices, inverters/converters, fluids and accessories, plus fancy new Hydrovane compressors, refrigerant air-drying, building works and installation costs don't leave much change out of £45k, but that's all sunk cost and I'm ignoring any thoughts about making it pay for itself. I'd have frittered the money away on testgear or a van or antennas or a new car anyway.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I was assuming around 50k and if you can't spend your money on the things you want at our age when can you?!!? During my brother in law's army service in his youth he visited many places that he always intended to go back to in order to actually _see_ them. This just never happened, so he spent decades working away and never taking holidays, so when he finally retired (one false start... just a couple more contracts... honest) he realised that he had a massive nest egg and nothing to do with it. His solution was to find a partner and take at least 4 holidays a year, and it has served him very well. If you hang onto it then it just goes into the pockets of the care provider company directors and shareholders when you finally become incapable of independent living, so enjoy it while you can.
I cannot believe I didn't use one of the vinyl stickers. I filmed that a few weeks ago and noticed immediately I edited the previous video. Now it's MUCH shinier!
I haven't tried, but I guess I could so some interesting thing on stiff materials. I'm using a lot of CF-PLA at the moment, not sure how that would machine, guess I need to find out!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves uncoated endmills are best for the cuts. Just look at the material and what you're doing when gripping it. Using plugs to reinforce from flex works a treat
@@MachiningandMicrowaves on the right path. I've always respected manual machinist because it's such a dark art and backlash actually helps so much. CNC is a bit different with antibacklash. Helps, but hinders sometimes.
I picked up some aluminium toolplate discs that were offcuts from a company that made roulette tables, basically these were the holes left over from machining the tables, they were in 1 1/4" aluminium toolplate and perfect for making a 12" pulley, so it may be worth looking around your area for companies that make stuff and have waste- while I was collecting, I noticed their scrap bins alo had 24" aluminium discs, I actually found them by searching for aluminium discs on ebay (i am in Kent UK and the company I found was in Chartham)
I do have an arrangement with a local fabrication company, but there isn't a lot of metal industry other than sheet metal fabrication in this area. The local agricultural merchant has a small workshop in day sometime let me have bits of metal that came off tractors and harvesters.
It's "assembled in China" rather than "made in China", they've used excellent parts from several countries, and so far, the engineering seems to be way better than the price point would suggest. Let's see how it works in 5 years!
Yikes, your AMS is reporting very high humidity - if you haven't already removed the original dessicant bags from it I'd do so now, they have a tendency to leak water once they get saturated!
I'd had the AMS in bits to clear out some jammed bits. The filament had been in the dryer, or was freshly opened, and I'd just fitted new dessicant bags. An hour later, it stopped complaining! Very well spotted!
I've machined hundreds if not thousands of variations and full production runs of similar parts for the GBT receivers as well as the NGVLA and VLA and many more, just the ones off the top of my head. Frankly I'm a machinist and not an astro physicist like my father so I don't always know what I'm making, but as a I typically do one offs I always make two of whatever I happen to be making as the setup and machine time to make the second after the first part is done is inconsequential. The telescopes these were designed for are a fair bit bigger, I wonder if any of the stuff I have an actual spare part for is useful to you. On a side note when we created these parts that were sometimes phase shifter too small for ID machining even with custom ground machine tools or just features that were ucnmachineable, we would machine the inverse of the part out of aluminum and grow copper on it for weeks and weeks until the copper was thick enough to machine again. Then we would machine mounting features into the copper, finish the exterior of the rough grown copper, and drill out the majority of the aluminum we could reach but as there were often internal square fins we would then dissolve the rest of the aluminum in Galium or some sort of acid I believe, and then Gold plate the finished copper part. Just something to think about for a potential process for parts you may have thought were impossible to machine but had ideal RF properties. If you have any questions I'd be happy to help as much as I can!
I've been using potassium tetrahydroxozincate as an oxide strip to leave a layer of zinc on machined aluminium mandrels with 0.5 mm wide grooves about 2mm deep. After a while in the zincate, I rinse the mandrel and immerse it into a sodium dicyanoaurate bath with the electrolysis power turned on. The zinc dissolves immediately and a layer of gold starts getting deposited on to the bare unoxidised aluminium surface. Once I have a decent layer of gold, I go straight to a slow copper plating bath to try to build up an electroformed copper body with the grooves now being ridges. Once I have enough copper built up, I grip the mandrel in the lathe or mill and remove any excess material and give me a way to grip it, then drill or bore away as much of the aluminium as I can, then it goes into a warm, agitated sodium hydroxide bath to dissolve the rest of the and aluminium. I love the idea of using gallium! Next step is to set the resulting copper negative into an epoxy fill inside a machined metal body. That saves a bit of time, but assumes I've got enough plating to form flanges and stiffening ribs. I'm getting a lot of failures where the deposited fins are crumbling, I suspect because the slots in the aluminium are closing up at the top and leaving pockets of electrolyte inside the fins. I need to try with 1mm slots, then slice and polish the plated mandrel longitudinally. I hadn't though of doing the gold plating after dissolving the aluminium. I found an article from one of the US university labs but I've lost it. I've read the papers by Canning staff and of course I have the Canning book, from 1982 (23rd edition). I'd love to find that piece from the engineer at the university lab (Caltech maybe?). As always, I have No Idea What I'm Doing, but near-infinite resolve and zero fear of failure.
It involved a septic tank, a pressure washer, half a gallon of boiling water spilled on my left hand, my ankles getting tangled in the pressure hoses, causing me to do a spectacular fall, resulting in a high-speed impact with a brick wall with my right arm, an urgent visit to the emergency room burns specialists, and a HUGE contusion. My right arm was black from my palm to my bicep. A LOT of ouchies were involved. Superb service from the National Health Service throughout my recovery. Sadly it is not on video and the photos are WAAAAY to gruesome for RUclips. Think Zombie Apocalypse. Almost fully healed now apart from some nerve damage and rotator cuff issues. 2/10 would not recommend
Thanks Neil. Shiny! Funny looking lathe for making mostly axisymmetric parts :) I was wondering if you'd splashed out on some EM software that you could do parametric sweeps - mind you without a steep discount you could spend as much on that as the mill and it probably wouldn't be as much fun let's be honest.
I'm using scripted parametric sweeps with OpenEMS, that's about my only option unless one of the EM solver vendors takes pity on me and sponsors me with a free licence!
I would recommend getting some ETP eco grip in your most used endmill sizes ( since it's basicly a ER collet to hydraulic adapter ( you use the same holder but throw the coller itself and the nut away) so higher grip. Better damping and the ETP you can dile in the runout of the tool. Makeing it way better then a normal ER collet And for that taper in the horn I would make the finish path go from the bottom up instead of top down. That way the absolute "center/middle " of the tool which basically don't spin isn't in contact with the material and should give you a slightly better finish at no extra cost in anyway ( except for the "brown spot" factor ) Btw does it have through spindle cooling ?
Sadly, no through-spindle coolant, which means I can't use a coolant-driven turbine spindle speeder to get the 75,000 rpm I need for the smallest tools (unless I can work out a safe way to run a high pressure coolant line into an intermediate holder). I was about to buy some shrink collets as I have an induction heater, but those ETPs look interesting, especially with having the adjustment screws. Kind of expensive, and some of the smaller tooling has 3mm or 4mm shanks. Might be excellent for the 8/10/12 mm tools though. I tried bottom up on those tapers using a tool with a small corner radius and the finish was excellent. I just had to do some careful work to get a smooth transition above the corner of the step. I'm trying some modelling to see if I can use a smooth curve at the transition, and do a finish cut using a corner-radius endmill all the way. The step is where the additional TE mode is excited, so that the sidelobes of the antenna are suppressed. The phase velocity of the higher mode is different, the plan it to get them to arrive at the orifice with exactly the correct phase relationship to give the best possible cancellation of sidelobes, while ensuring that the axial ratio minimised, so the beam is symmetric. Of course, with the CNC, I could set up a pallet with 8 or more of the horns and machine different corner radii and throat lengths, then measure the actual results. That would help validate the models. At this point, my mother is going to say "seems like a lot of messing about just to talk to your friends on the radio". She watches this channel. Hi mum!!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves i dont know the price of them but i do know that NSK America corporation sell high speed( up to 80000 rpm ) electric in spindle motor's and for the ETP you can put some heat shrink sleeves/ectension on any tool thats smaller then 12mm ( so you only buy 12mm ones and then addapt all the smaller tools to fit into the 12mm holder ( maybe even turn those sleeves/extensions youself on your lathe. so long that the hole and outside is turned in the same setup they should easily be within +-0.0005mm of runout ) btw if the surface finish have any effect on how the horn works and you need a extremely smooth surface finish then i will recommend picking up some MCD diamond braced end mill's. or if you just need/want to make something with a little more bling/shine to them ( though they are only for non magnetic/ no steel material. like copper.aluminium.plastic.titanium and that kind of stuff )
Generally diy machines tend to be cheaper such as the printnc, but they do require a lot of fiddling to get up and running. The full blown machines like you've got there probably make sense if your selling something your making as the cost of the machine as you've said is very large.
I should be able to recoup the capital cost of the machine in less than 3 years doing high-value low-volume work, but I've just been beaten to market on one product, and I'm not going to compete on price. I'm going up-market, with silver and gold plating and only looking at a small proportion of the market. Most CNC shops would think of the X5 as a tiny machine, but the thing weighs more than two tons
If you ever need amything at all Feel free to reach out, tools, programming, or just someone to bounce your thoughts off of! Id love to have a convo sometime, just found the channel and im immersing myself in your world. Very impressive!
I have a propane/waste oil furnace that is OK for melting aluminium, bronze and copper, and an induction machine that is good for smaller parts. My supply of scrap engines and other aluminium parts has dried up. I need to get my trailer repaired so I can go out on the scrounge for suitable scrap for larger castings. Definitely worth making new bar stock from offcuts and wrecked parts though, so long as I can perfect my fluxing and dross-removal skills!
I am a gear head, always into nice gear to try out and tinker with. Subtractive or additive modeling including CAD is unchartered land for me. Your content is very interesting though. I don't get the IRL use for your builds. You design and construct antennas for microwave radio, is that it? What's the actual application for those? Is it RX or TX or both? Would you please give a hint to one of your videos, so I could get more behind your activity? Thanks a lot!
I've been a bit inscrutable about how I use these things, mostly because a lot of what I make is used by other folks around the world. My key interests are in pushing the limits of communication via moonbounce/earth-moon-earth reflection, rain/snow/hail forward scatter (Mie/Rayleigh), aircraft as passive over-the-horizon reflectors, satellite communications, using larger LEO sats and the International Space Station as passive reflectors, troposcatter, tropospheric ducting, structure/geology reflections, mmWave imaging, deep space network satellite monitoring and generally pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible in microwave/mmWave/infra-red/optical communications. I'll try to show some of the usage in upcoming videos
@@MachiningandMicrowaves thank you! I f I knew my maths I would take lots of joy in trying how far I could think things like the ones you mentioned… It’s always a pleasure to have people „around“ who are smarter thinkers than oneself, I reckon. So, please give us insights into your world!👍🏻
I created a second channel for deep dives into the maths and physics, but time pressures beat me. I really should do some vids about the process and science, with very little editing or fancy graphics. Too much Stuff To Do right now though
I can't remember the name of the manufacturer of the toolchanger. It's motor-driven and works fairly well, I've had a couple of minor issues with tools sticking in the taper and making quite a thump when they come out, but a tiny smear of grease helps, and it's only happening before the spindle warms up properly, so now I run the daily warm-up cycle before changing any tools. Just need to remember to leave a suitable tool in the spindle when shutting down
@@MachiningandMicrowaves They've been around a long time, so probably expired. Does the tool changer engage a gear on spindle when changing? That's how the Fanuc rotates the changer. Most people will argue to never leave a tool in the spindle, keep it perfectly clean, and don't add any lubrication as you never want it to have a change to move and wear.
@@clytle374 the changer has its own motor drive but it has a cam which is operated by moving the spindle above the zero position. It isn't possible to leave the spindle empty unless you leave one position on the changer empty. There is a gentle air bleed to keep chips out of the bottom of the spindle, but there is also an air blast, which is designed to clear any chips from inside the taper or on the tool holder itself. I'm going to try leaving one position on the changer empty to see if that solve those rather alarming clunks as the ramp changes the first tool holder after a cold start. I cleaned the grease off the tapers of the tool holders and spindle now and there's just a light smear on the pool stud and the grooves where the mounting forks engage
@@sparc5 I have two other pensions, and I am still working part time as an IT security architect and data network engineer I bought a 10 hp solid state inverter and sinewave filter, but the excessive earth leakage current during start-up of some of the solid state controllers in the X5 caused a breaker to trip. The resulting transient destroyed one channel on the inverter. The supplier had never heard of this failure before, so I purchased a second unit because I needed to get the X5 up and running. That also blew up with a different fault, so I purchased a rotary converter that is horribly noisy but entirely bulletproof. Probably my ADHD has kicked in, but I haven't pursued the supplier yet. The electricity supplier wanted around £11,000 to make the connection for three phase. The noise from the rotary converter limits what I can do about machining late into the night but might actually be a good thing, but I've lost over £3000 as a result of this mess
@@MachiningandMicrowaves ouch! Not a cheap hobby. Another thing that occurred to me when watching is how you're just picking up CAD and CNC. Each of these has such a steep learning curve that is probably lost on your audience. I'm glad you decided to include the part of you breaking the bit so we didn't get the impression you're superhuman.
@@sparc5 i've been very clear with myself so that I don't have any wild dreams of becoming a profitable job shop. I've only spent money that I can afford to lose, I haven't borrowed a cent to fund any of my new toys. This was all about shortening the development cycle and allowing me to make what would otherwise be expensive mistakes, in the privacy of my own workshop.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves yes. I kept waiting to hear the part where you recoup your pension and it never came. Makes sense to spend the money, you can't take it with you.
A friend of mine started with early signs of dementia, and had some other age-related mobility issues. She'd lived her life extremely well, doing everything she could as she knew there was a good change that her genetics would come to bite her. Before things got terrible, she got her affairs fully in order, ordered some materials from the dark web, wrote a lot of letters and emails, and left this life on her own terms. I hope I have the strength of will to emulate her if I go the same way. My mum is 94 and still going strong as ever though, and my gran lived to be 101 and my uncle into his 90s, but those two had dementia, so I'm just going for it, flat out while I can.
@@rfengr00 Kuhne transverters on 24 and 47GHz, plus some Wavelab units on 24. I have a 3 m solid prime focus - 2.4 and 1.8 meter solid offset but I am unlikely to be able to communicate via the moon on 24 GHz without a lot more power. Maybe just combining the outputs from four wave lab units would be sufficient if I use the largest dish . A 3 m dish on 24 GHz is really too large to illuminate the moon effectively, so I'll probably start with the 2.4 offset and keep the three meter dish for 3.4, 5.7 and 10 GHz.
Heh heh, I have gigabit fibre into the machine shop and 5 GHz wifi everywhere now. I have a 1 metre dish and feed on 2.4 GHz that puts a decent signal into the geostationary satellite QO-100 at 36,000 km above Qatar using 800 mW, so range isn't a problem! I'm working on some omnidirectional lens antennas for the 5 GHz wifi, perhaps I should do one for 2.4 GHz with a tailored pattern to improve coverage down my garden. Have to stay within the legal limits, but if I can put some deep nulls on the access points/routers in my neighbours' houses, that might improve throughput on the lowband wifi channels.
My grandfather use to be in you hobby but was old-school doing it all by hand, this is oddly like like chatting with him throughout my childhood. Anyway I'm wondering if surface finish/quality would have a effect? Question as a odd watchmaker.
It comes down to scattering and surface conduction losses. Very similar to getting mirror finishes on optical equipment. I aim for 1/20th of a wavelength RMS error, so at 122 GHz, with 2.4 mm wavelength, that's over 100 micrometres across the whole surface. I like to get better than that locally, especially inside waveguide bores, where scattering can cause unwanted TE/TM modes as well as losses. Even so, a 5 micrometre finish is good enough. Professional pride makes me want to do better if I can though, especially if I'm using gold overplating
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I just found a plating video you have I might have some sujestions on plating in the features/pits/grooves depending on your if you want from my industry. As for plastic covers that are transparent vacuum molded should be a good shout as I asked a friend in the industry who gave me two hours of lessons on the phone. Again I can expand if it would help, but you seem very well versed in manufacturing and your hobby. It's been very nice following you videos so far. Thank you. My grandfather would have loved your channel.
I was thinking about the old vacuum forming machine I used in the 1970s and whether there's a non-polar thermoplastic sheet material that is UV resistant with negligible water absorption and a loss tangent less than about 0.005. GRP is the usual solution, but HDPE and polycarbonate are reasonable solutions. I've machined some from PTFE, but that's a very expensive solution
@@MachiningandMicrowaves from what I remember there's a few thermo plastics that will do the trick though I'm afraid I will have to ask for that list on my friends next day off. Though I used to know the owner of the company who made the drums that covered the old mobile phone antennas, the big round ones from the days of blackberry and Nokia. I'll have to reconnect as its been a long time since he moved to Bulgaria and I lost a brilliant client. But that said I remember him telling me about the process, exact heating to ensure equal thinning over the whole drum for strength and transparency. His company was the only one that could do this in Europe at the time. It was fascinating. It's been decades since I have used a vacuum mold it was one of my favourite toys for prototyping. I'll do my best to get back to you soon with information feel free to contact me I'm longterm ill so this is the first brain workout for a long time so having fun.
I have some polyethylene injection-moulded covers used for telephone joints by British Telecom, they are quite transparent to microwaves and they are very close to a half-wave thick after allowing for the relative permittivity of the material, so have no effect on the radiation pattern. Styrene sheets (sometimes called high-impact polystyrene) are excellent RF dielectrics, but I think their UV survival might be limited. PVC is pretty disastrous, it crumbles to powder after a few years in sunlight. PE plumbing pipes work well, but I'd really like to have the ability to create my own shapes and sizes
I've been talking to a 3D metal fab about a sponsorship deal but they don't offer high conductivity materials, plus there are complex shrinkage metrics to deal with and it's unclear how hollow forms like waveguides or resonant cavities would behave at the corners. Maybe if printed at an angle to limit overhang? Getting a sufficiently conductive and smooth internal finish to prevent scattering will be challenging, and getting plating to adhere evenly inside concave voids will be hard as a hard thing. Electropolishing will be similarly challenging. I'm thinking mostly about using that technology for extremely complex geometries that support other components, like gimbals and handles and solid-looking metal parts that have lattices internally. At lowish frequencies, the tolerances and finishes might be acceptable, but the parts would be very large. Copper, silver, or at a pinch, aluminium, would be good materials, 316 stainless or bronzes, less so
@@MachiningandMicrowaves hence me being curious - I know very little about RF, a bit more about 3D printing.. but nothing at this level. Honeycomb or iso-grid structures, like the support of a fish seem like logical candidates - yet metal 3D printing is most offered on smalish part, nothing like dish shaped structures. Yet some of the sintered prints machine quit OK for finishing passes.
@@SarahKchannel The application I'm considering is a reflectarray, where you have a large number of individual curved hexagonal facets, each with a set of three mounts which are driven by small actuators so you can modify the direction of the beam of the "dish" and sweep it rapidly without having to move massive stiff structures. The other application I'd love to try is waveguide combiners, where you have eight or more rectangular hollow tubes of varying heights, which have input waveguide flanges and which are then merged in a sort of tree structure, inside a solid matrix. T radio frequency energy sent into each port combines in phase and appears out of the output port with almost 8 times the power. There is a serious limit to the amount of power a single device can produce at those frequencies, so a combiner like that is a simple, passive solution to achieve better output power. Milling them from solid is a nightmare job because you can't have joints other than along the broad faces, so it isn't at all easy to get the mechanical arrangement right. A 3D printed version could have a complex interweave of curved tubes to minimise the envelope of the entire structure
I think that would work, so long as the alignment was good. Perhaps using dovetails or dowels or something, or even a dielectric glue or cement. Perhaps if I can find a source of Rexolite 1422 offcuts, that might work with polystyrene cement
@@MachiningandMicrowaves with a dragon scale type pattern of facets, you should be able to get away with far smaller pieces of source materials, and even have the options of different materials per scale. im sure that could lead to some interesting new toys to play with :P
@@zutai1 that's an interesting thought and it's sort of leading the way towards making an adaptive reflectarray, with each scale on a flexure with tiny actuators. I've been thinking a lot about radio telescopes using large phased arrays, but I only have a little more than 1 acre of land and I think it would be much more effective to work with other folks on a VLBI array approach with a baseline of maybe 100 km. That does start to cause difficulties of clock distribution though. Getting a sufficiently stable distributed clock system using GPS-disciplined rubidium clocks or even high stability quartz master oscillators like my Morion MV-89a system in its triple-oven vibration-isolated and magnetically shielded enclosure might be good enough for baselines of tens of km. So many project ideas, so little time...
@MachiningandMicrowaves I wonder about using a ditect line of sight coms between nodes for calibration, rather than only GPS or the like. Combined with a faceted franel lens, they should have good enough timing signals, even if you have to bounce it off the atmosphere.
There are problems with scintillation even on links in the 100km range, but the alternative is hydrogen masers or direct dark fibre. I must remember to buy lottery tickets. I think that with a baseline the size of a county or a small country, it might be possible to use some very well-isolated GPS disciplined oscillators with maybe a 0.01 mHz (yes, millihertz) loop bandwidth to apply long-term stabilisation, but relying on the oscillators themselves for stability and lack of jitter and noise over scales from 100 ns to 10 s. I need to talk to some nearby amateur radio astronomers. Conveniently, I know one of the folks at a nearby astronomy association who have their own small observatory. Project for next year I think. I already have the DiFX correlation/sync code (see www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/difx/difxuserguide.pdf)
I might convert my lathe using LinuxCNC, I have a very nice 750 watt servomotor, and the inverter for the spindle motor has a control input, so I should be able to get constant surface speed over a range of diameters. Just need a second motor and a way to link into the Spherosyn scales on the old lathe. I think I prefer to burn my time making parts rather than the perfectly valid time-burning alternative of building or converting a mill to CNC
Wow you are brave but I can definitely see the attraction as I too have a manual lathe and mill. Over and above learning how to drive the damned thing all the tooling worries me as it seems inordinately expensive even from China. I dont make anything like RF stuff so I think if Im going down the path of CNC I will start with a laser cutter, something that will cut thin metal would be my dream
I just had an offer of a fibre MOPA laser unit, but it doesn't cut metal foil. I use my Creality laser to make assembly fixtures, boxes and all sorts of things that I never expected. I have a manual plasma cutter but I'd certainly like to have a CNC plasma table for cutting plate. Wire EDM is the other thing I would like to have available.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yes wire EDM is incredible, I have a friend with one but the setup etc and keeping it running is on a whole other level, you really need access to pretty good metrology gear. I do have access to a similar laser for plastics and rubber etc but I really want metal and its quite a lot more expensive
Complicated reasons. These two vids were made to replace lectures that I was going to present at the Microwave Update conference in Vancouver. For complicated and boring reasons, my flight got messed up and I couldn't get there in time without spending a fortune on new tickets, so I made the two vids and did a live Q&A afterwards. I wasn't sure whether the esteemed and distinguished audience at the conference were ready for a snarky avatar pointing out my abundant shortcomings and mistakes, so invoked a temporary firewall rule as an AIMEE-suppressant. The dilithium crystals can't sustain that level of shielding for much longer, so I suspect the Return of the Snark is imminent...
Oh wow thats a nice machine... Considering they're going for like $300.... You might consider making "Steelsticks" for the Nintendo 64 controller. Slowly making back the money spent lol
@@Sugar3Glider That's an interesting idea for certain. I'm working hard on finishes and packaging and branding and all of the annoying side quests that appears as soon as you try to make the hobby into a business.
Always like you're video's. I have very similar kit but a different set of esoteric hobbies. You should consider a resin printer to prototype some parts. Bit of a learning curve for precision prints and unfortunately the curve is very different than filament printers. Haven't had to metal coat resin yet, figure plan B would be vacuum sputtering if some electroless method didn't work. Cheers-Peter
After the deep dive I did into industrial resin printers when I visited Fortify and Rogers Corp in the US for the ruclips.net/video/3YMRfw0uWlw/видео.html video, the affordable hobbyist+ resin machines feel a bit limited. I keep getting offers of machines for free, but I don't feel I'd get enough use from one at the moment. If I start to do a lot of centrifugal casting, that might change. Sadly, there isn't really an economically-viable material that could be used to make gradient index lenses on a resin printer. If I can get the controller for my turbomolecular pump running, I'll be doing some PVD and simple sputtering. I don't know how resins would behave in terms of outgassing under vacuum, and whether a metal coating would remain attached and take an electroformed/plated overlayer. It would be fun finding out though
@@deuterium8236 Ben Krasnow has some interesting videos on sputtering/vapor deposition in the garage/shed. It's a shame he has cut back on uploads but that probably means he's been working on some other outrageous projects.
Yep, there's a surprising number of folks making and using magnetron sources. On a different slant, I need to find a paper on cylindrical cold-cathode magnetron electron guns so get enough free electrons to make a few amps of current in a hard vacuum. The usual sources are intended to maximise ion production, I want to maximise electron production instead. Paywalls are everywhere and the usual tools don't seem to have them indexed. Not that I'd ever use such tools, obvs, no no no.
I have an Alexander D-bit grinder, but most of my tooling has inserts or is carbide with parabolic flutes or variable pitch, or is absolutely tiny, so it's very hard to grind them, even with diamond cup wheels. I rarely bother sharpening very small drills. I can grind split points by hand at 4mm up
One of the ways to measure antenna and radio system performance is to point the antenna at the sun or the moon, measure the amount of thermal noise, then point it at a patch of sky with very few active foreground sources. If you know the current solar flux index, You can then use the ratio of thermal noise power from the sun against that from an empty patch of sky. A bit of calculation and you can work out the equivalent noise temperature or the noise figure of your entire system. The Noise temperature of that patch of sky is dependent on the frequency where you're observing. It is usually considerably more than the cosmic microwave background, But usually 20 to 50 K. At some frequencies though the whole sky appears almost room temperature because of molecular absorption bands for water vapour and oxygen. I should make a video about that.
So far, it seems like excellent value. Support from the factory has been splendid. One minor irritation is that you can't open the doors with the power off without climbing on top of the machine and messing with the latch. It means I'm unable to open the door late at night because I'm using a rather noisy rotary converter and it would disturb the neighbourhood. The lack of a manual release on the spindle is slightly irritating. I can only change to a new tool using the auto changer. The only other minor niggle is that I managed to press the wrong button when I was aiming to move the spindle upwards but drove it downwards into the workpiece, which was seated in the vice. The amount of pressure that was exerted by the tool shattered the corners of the flutes and pressed the core of the cutter into the workpiece quite impressively. The Z axis reported an overload and the machine stopped. The problem was that the Z axis force was now too great for the and ball screws to operate. There's no manual override and the tool was seated in the tool holder, so I couldn't simply release the colette. The only way I could remove the emergency stop condition was by using a hand drill and hacksaw to cut away the workpiece. That was half an hour of my life that I'll never get back. The lack of a coolant washdown hose is slightly irritating but fixable. The work envelope of approximately 10 inch cube it's the main limitation but as I couldn't get a larger machine through the door, that's a compromise I'll have to live with.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves wow thank you for sharing your experience. I also like to get a small machine and they seem good on paper but I never personally used them so your real user experience is well appreciated!
In my experience at least, CAD really only saves paper and pencils...and I question whether that's a good thing given that making and burying paper sounds like a pretty decent carbon sequestration strategy. CAD hates me and it's mutual.
I took a while to get used to Fusion, it seems stupidly obtuse, but now it feels totally natural. I've changed! I'm going to look at other CAM code to see if there's any advantage. Some of the adaptive paths are not very clever, and there are irritating bits where I can hand-code the g code myself much more efficiently than the post-processor.
Cutsol Crystal Cool from Cutwel UK. I tried to get some Blaser fully-synth coolant, but couldn't even get a response to my sales enquiry. Terrible customer service. I really hate having to go through sales people when all I want is to buy a barrel of forbidden juice dammit. Especially when most of my shopping is done at 3 am on a Sunday morning. No excuse for not having an online shop surely?
@@MachiningandMicrowaves i guess you mean blaser synergy 735? we were advised (by our blaser dealer) not to use full synthetic because it may be hard on the seals of the machine and cause them to leak and eventually fail, that synergy 735 specifically leaves a very sticky residue, and that it's really only meant for specific alloys or it reacts with it and make the surface splotchy or something. my boss wanted to try some zebora full synthetic for filming purposes, but because we've been using a mineral oil based emulsion coolant (also from blaser; multicool mc610) it was never going to be perfectly clear, even after flushing the system many times. stability-wise and odor-wise i've actually been pretty happy with mc610, no bacteria even though our machine sits around for weeks at a time and good surface finishes; it just doesn't look like water haha full synth is supposedly also worse for your skin and general health than oil based coolants
@@ikbendusan my original reason was so that I could use a spinning disc camera enclosure and see-through to the workpiece through the supposedly clear solution. That all works fine until you have tools of any significant diameter which create a dense spray which scatter light even though it's transparent. I'll probably, use the rest of this 5 gallon drum and then look at alternatives. It is extremely well-behaved and the residue isn't particularly sticky but then I don't leave the machine idle for more than a day if I happen to be away. It's very easy to separate the tramp oil from the total loss way lubrication. I just use oil absorbent sheets on top of the coolant tanks once a week. I haven't noticed any problems with the Cutwel fluid on my skin although some of the traditional cutting oils do give me dermatitis. Ester-based cutting oil seems to be fine and hydraulic and way oil don't seem to affect me either. The value of being able to film inside the machine isn't as great as I expected anyway it's kind of boring after the first 20 clips. I might try using my mist lubricator for anything where the machining is really interesting, but removing large quantities of material at high rates in aluminium without the flood coolant is a recipe for disaster, as I found my cost when trying to film an expensive 6 mm cutter throwing rooster tails at high removal rates
Mostly by radio amateurs for terrestrial microwave and millimetre wave experimentation. One specific use is where an Australian amateur adapted A122 gigahertz MM wave radar chip designed for position detection detection in industrial processes over a few 10s of metres, but with a good antenna and a clear path on a cold dry day it's possible to get over 100 kilometres range using voice and some clever digital algorithms. Other uses are for communication via the moon, sending 10s or hundreds of Watts of microwave energy and getting back signals on the other side of the Earth which are very very close to the thermal noise level.
There's something thrilling about hearing your own signal coming back off the moon after a few seconds, or off the auroral curtain after ten milliseconds. It never gets old
Something about a decent metal printer costing a ludicrous amount! Also the lack of precision with sintering compared with machining, at least for now. I'm working on a sponsored vid for a metal 3d fab shop, but it's early days yet.
I do some work for universities, television, and commercial companies but there are some barriers. Because I'm not running a limited company, some organisations are enable to deal with me as a sole trader. I don't hold any certifications for manufacture, so anyone needing ISO 9000 may find it difficult to deal with me. The other aspect is the time not particularly interested in production runs or job shop work with tight deadlines. I do enjoy the work for college and university department, particularly where the work is for a student project. The thumbnail image on this video is for a piece of commercial work which I can't talk about yet
that was an absolute disaster, but I was in a hurry to get it finished and didn't want to re-record. It turns out that capturing from the second 4k screen on my laptop is extremely slow and I hadn't realised. I've updated the Nvidia driver since then, and it's slightly better, but I'm using the, winkey-G Xbox recorder and that's probably the reason it's terrible. I'd uninstalled the proper screen capture software because I wanted to use the license on another machine and hadn't reinstalled it. Bit of a disaster all round in fact!
I have OBS, but the other thing, whose name I can't remember, is just so damned convenient, I've carried on using it even though I don't have a subscription to the main software suite any more. Thanks for the tip about Shadowplay, I'll have a look
Ultimately, because a lot of other microwave and mmWave radio experimenters are not in the privileged position of not having more important calls on their economic resources. I can make stuff that they imagine and can describe, so they can have extra fun doing their specialist area of experimentation. My lovely Patreon and Ko-Fi supporters fund the materials and carriage costs so I can make cutting-edge parts that can bring a bit of joy and fun into the lives of those experimenters with brilliant ideas but empty wallets.
Caroline died in 2021, that's what gave me the impetus to start this channel. We were married for 37 years and I can't remember a single time when she told me I couldn't do a project. She never even gave me the old eye-roll and sigh... I never told her she couldn't do anything either. So many folks I hear from say "I'd love to do but my significant other won't let me". Funny sort of relationship that must be. I have a new partner now, we've known each other for almost 40 years and she's also 100% behind me and my daft ideas and projects and shopping addiction.
AIMEE had a temporary break for these two videos. Something about visa restrictions on gaining access to Canada for unembodied virtual snarkbots. When my trip to present the talks in Vancouver was messed up by the airline booking agency, I had to rush flat out to turn the talks into videos in a last-minute flurry of panic. Nailed it, but AIMEE was left on the subs bench for these two fixtures.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Oh, well maybe you know something about CNC machines and can help me with the one I bought at the Thrift Store. My popcorn button is broken, I keep pressing it and only get a rotating table and lights and noise, but no popcorn. However, the number buttons all mostly work. If I press a 1, I get a 1. If I press a 2, I get a 2... etc. But there seems to be no plus minus multiply or divide buttons so I'm stumped as to what to do next to begin calculations. I press Start and then again with the rotating table and lights and noise... but no computating or milling... just my numbers counting down. I try it with a part on the rotating table, but then I get sparks and sometimes something that appears to be plasma.
@@choppergirl Is it one of those thrift stores that magically appear, full of wondrous and mysterious items and then when you go back a few days later there's no sign of it ever having existed?
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yeah, that's why when I saw a WO-33a vacuum tube oscilliscope for 5 bucks, I grabbed it and rushed to the counter! An osciliscope at that price is never coming poor girl's way ever again! Fortune favors the bold.
@@RoboArc Not many options, and of course a lot of the additional costs are in tooling and vane compressors and vices and fluids and dehumidifier and phase converters, plus shipping and installation services so I spent about double the price of the machine overall. Also, I do have two other pensions!
@MachiningandMicrowaves oh ok, as long as you didn't spend all of your money 😌. I love the machine and dream of the day I can afford something like this. I don't have a full shop yet or anything. Can't really fit that bad boy anywhere. In America we can get older machines for cheap, usually broken down or otw out the door for under 10k. I built a 3d printed cnc for kicks, but I'll eventually get a professional 5 axis in the near future. Maybe not as nice as yours though 😄 little out of budget.
@MachiningandMicrowaves I have some plans for one actually 😅 the price gets out from under you though and I'm a poor college student at the moment lolz. Tip tho, use UHMW for the frame. It's cheap and it's incredibly strong, I use it a lot in my own robotics projects. Engineering plastics are a fun subject to mess around with. Especially for hobby stuff, you can get a big sheet of uhmw for 150$~250 ish and other stuff is just as cheap. Might speed up your build since you can actually do high feed rates at a decent DOC with that machine. As long as you keep your designs simple in shapes as well, then you should be able to speed up project production by a fair amount. . I've taken a few computer aided design courses and simple designs take less time to generate.
I just bought a slab of UHMWPE that's 500x500x45 mm, think it cost £46, which is excellent value for making mmWave lenses at least. I couldn't justify a full sheet, but it's a really nice material. Hadn't thought of it for framing, good tip, thanks
Im with you on the casting of aluminum to create shapes in dimensions that would ruin your budget if you had to buy a 6m length, for example . I thought it would be great to recycle the aluminum chips from the lathe. it turns out they were a real mess in the furnace. Sort of burned rather than melted , maybe because of the surface area? Melting some bigger bits so you can drop the chips into the liquid was better. The other thing was chips that had been wet with cutting oil previously also didnt go so well. Now i use old ali engine parts, ali car rims are also good as they have the type stamped inside . Love your work
I did think a bit about using an argon purge chamber with my induction heater and melting compressed pellets of chips made with the hydraulic press, but I'd still have to use some solvent to pre-clean the chips. I think taking them to a recycler with a vacuum furnace might be the only sensible solution for chips and offcuts less than about 6 mm cross-section. I'll probably only get pennies for a dustbinful, but at least it won't go to landfill
This vid was a talk I presented remotely to the Microwave Update conference in Vancouver. I've probably used abbreviations and jargon that are aimed at an informed bunch of techie microwave radio nerds. I'll be making dedicated videos about the design and manufacturing process, but if there's any extreme jargon or acronyms/initialisms, please feel free to drop a comment with a timestamp and I'll try to shed some light on what on earth I was banging on about.
Happy to see a X5 out there, just because I want to buy one too 😂
Don't worry Neal, there are a bunch of us that did not notice any of those abbreviations as they are in our daily alphabet soups. My friend and I have built each our laboratories, while going up only to a few Ghz, with HP/Agilent, Tek and I suspect some R&S soon, to experiment to our heart's content. I imagine we are not alone in your viewer bunch. Now did you throw in your AI assistant for that CNC setup? We haven't heard of her? Anywho, I wonder how much of an RF lab you have, if any...
@@2oqp577 I have a basic setup, with an HP specan that goes to 26.5 GHz, plus external mixers to get me to 50 GHz, an Agilnet E4406A, a few E4433 sig gens, 20 GHz counter, lots of power meters and heads up to 70 GHz, a Fluke 8845A 6.5 digit DVM, several AC millivoltmeters, a range of slotted line, sliding shorts, sliding loads, directional couplers, the usual LiteVNA/PocketVNA and a few other cheap VNAs, calibrated SOLTs to 50 GHz, some old HP VNAs (pre-8510), plus heaps of cavity wavemeters, rotary vane attenuators to 76 GHz, vacuum pumps and associated bits, 15 kV variable DC supplies and all the detritus from 50+ years of hoarding. Also a few frequency standards, Rubidium, well-aged and thermally/physically isolated quartz, backed by a couple of GPSDOs with decent antennas. I only have three 42U racks in my study, and there are still a few spaces in there. Having been close to a few Keysight PNAs in labs I've visited, I'd really like a decent modern VNA that can go beyond 24 GHz, but that needs significant funds. Unless Keysight want to lend me one and some range extenders and standards?
@@2oqp577 I wasn't sure that the esteemed audience at Microwave Update was quite ready for AIMEE. I am sure the snarkmeister will return as normal service is resumed
It certainly felt a bit of a risk, but since Titan got involved, and they got more national sites, it feels a lot safer choice. I miss through-spindle coolant and a wash-down hose, and should have gone with a proper Renishaw-style probe and a 4th axis drive, but my funds were limited.
This channel is basically Technology Connections, but RF, in the UK. Brilliant.
Alec has MUCH better hair than me. I already had a Kallax unit and stole the background idea from Rob at VidIQ before I'd seen Alec's channel. Alec's lighting is also WAAAAY better than my cheap LED strings pinned to the rear and illuminating a curtain made from bed sheets.
say no more. I'm subbing
@@MachiningandMicrowaves His hair is spectacular indeed! But you have the ability to make a really impressive wig from alu chips instead!
@@H3adcrash Carbon nanotubes. Mmmmmmm
@@BunkerSquirrel Thanks!
Resale value is probably less durable than your house, but a damn sight better than a car. Have fun!
I kinda hope that it will outlast me, but now I want a CNC lathe and a 4th/5th axis and a coolant-driven spindle speeder and.....
@@MachiningandMicrowaves don't fall into that trap, 4th is great to have, but 5th is waste of money for this sort of thing, not to mention that 5axis cam cost, that is extra $$$ in Fusion, along with 4th, and work envelope will decrease drastically with the addon 5th solutions in a machine that wasn't designed as 5x in the first place
unless you _really_ need that, it is better to design parts that don't need that complexity and added investment
@@dsfs17987 Sound advice, I'll wait until I win the lottery before considering anything beyond a decent 4th axis drive
Wonderful to see somebody niche a hobby so intense and getting all the choice wish list tools ticked off. Living the dream Sir, living it real
I have three 42U racks of electronic testgear, and more on the way, but I'd love a surface grinder and a CNC-converted lathe. The vacuum PVD and sputtering gear is almost ready to roll, and the electrochemistry bench is fully equipped. I even have all the necessary regulatory stuff in place to buy concentrated acids and other controlled chemicals. Had to install a special cabinet for those. It's very yellow.
@@MachiningandMicrowaveswhen I grow up I wanna be just like you. 😂
@@LiyangHU Yikes!
this man is crazy, love from france
CNC was a no-brainer, less stress, easy workflow. Hell, when you're gone, the government won't want a CNC machine..🤣🤣
Man how different the world is. I'm in the middle of deep drawing some sheet steel from a veggie oil drum as part of a dial pan for an old clock I'm building by hammering out the sheet on hand made dies and here you are, twice my senior, whipping out some of the latest in manufacturing advancements. You're a complete madlad and not a cent was wasted on that CNC machine!
I'm also a woodworker and do a bit of blacksmithing and sheet metalwork and steel fabrication, but nothing good enough for public consumption. I just love the whole "making things from ideas in my head" process. I was taught how to use hammers to move metal around when I was 17, and that muscle-memory is still there. I come from a long line of agricultural workers, ditch-diggers and carters, where having a wide range of obscure skills was seen as something natural and vital. I'm a half-decent dressmaker, I can knit, and I'm a good commercial quality willow basketmaker, Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers of the City of London, no less! Sadly, I wasted my entire life doing horribly technical things with computers, comms, data networking and cybersecurity in the pursuit of funds to buy toys. I could've been a contender.... ruclips.net/video/efHzGxEzDQA/видео.html
@@MachiningandMicrowaves damn, you're even multi-talented! I've always wanted to try basket weaving, if at the very least to put all the invasive vines to use. Don't sell yourself short on what you put time in. If it gave you joy then it was worth it. If not, at least it paid for other things. Computing and electrical componentry has never been my strong suit so I applaud anyone with the talent to even apply those for career purposes.
In my case, I grew up poor and mum was very disheartened at how many things were not working correctly in her life, so in my spare time I learned ho to fix things by reading books at the library about wood and metal working and that sort of spiralled in to life skills I've since applied in several jobs over the years. It turns out a lot cheaper to fix things when you have the tools to fix them and raw materials are so abundant people just throw them out if they're not the right shape.
I absolutely love the idea of putting skills to more community efforts so I occasionally volunteer at a repair shop that mostly deals with consumer stuff. Although just like you, I also love the process of putting pencil to paper and turning those hasty scribbles in to something useable and practical, or even just working with a half-baked idea and having the hands to bring it to the real world like wood carving or engraving.
@@classydays43 I was homeless for a while around 1982. I was sleeping in the directors' boardroom of an abandoned oil, coal and salt warehouse on a disused dock in Hull. That taught me some very useful lessons about surviving and even thriving. My mum describes her life when I was young as being "poor as a church mouse", and I had to learn a lot of make-do-and-mend skills that most folks wouldn't need to pick up. I was definitely in the "posh" tier of homeless, I wasn't sleeping in doorways, and the warehouse was safe and dry. I made a little money using my furniture-making skills to produce fake antique pine furniture in a workshop in the Fish Meal factory. The lads in the fabrication shop there let me use their huge metalworking machines in return for biscuits and cakes. I picked up a lot of skills during that time, and I'd completed most of the useful parts of a four-year electronic engineering degree, and the rest is history. I lost interest in electronics for work and went back into computer stuff just in time for the boom in business computing. I knew a lot of esoteric stuff that others didn't, and that paid what felt like serious money!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves wow what a story! Amazing how far a little kindness from the men in that shop has stretched. They could easily write a movie about that
It's only "money", your grandkids were thinking "inheretance", LOL.
I know I would, heh.
I would prefer to inherit a CNC machine :D
I remember saying a couple of years back, "why don't you get a CNC machine Neil?" Glad you took my advice 😊. Anyway, well done. That ticks many boxes.
Money - can't take it with you. ✅️
He with most toys wins ✅️
Massive increase in your Al chip collection ✅️
More time for sleep (I know you don't) while your toys beaver away making you stuff. ✅️
Phenomenal purchase and video Neil. Looking forward to seeing more!
@@theradiorover I remember it well, so it's all your fault!
I'm so happy more and more people are learning CAD/CAM
My first exposure was in 1983, but apart from a bit of 3D printing, I've never used any CAM systems. After a month, I was able to write my own postprocessor for Fusion to drive the SYIL mill as a vertical lathe. I've been coding since the early 1970s so that wasn't very hard.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yeah, the hard part is going to be learning all the "best practices" for machining and figuring out exactly what speeds/feeds your tools like for the materials you're cutting. Strongly recommend getting the aluminum-specific cutters. They will save you a lot of frustration from chips welding themselves to the bit, completely ruining your surface finish.
@@simoncleret I'm using mostly YG-1 and Korloy A+ lapped carbide end mills and high-rake lapped inserts, and DLC coated threadmills, plus some chip-splitting semi-roughers. Coolant is full-synthetic. I'm using some cobalt-HSS tools for plastics. Also using some worm-pattern drills for aluminium and some special brass drills.
Oh what's that you say, production run capability unlocked? What a marvelous addition to the shop!
Huge win for syil community. Welcome brother
Thrilled for you. I look forward to seeing what you can create.
Wow, that's a serious CNC machine for a home shop. Exceptional choice!
Wow... Congratulations, man! Really stunning new toy... I mean... tool! 😃
Looking forward to see what you make next!
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
It's funny how electricals signals just go from meandering about in cables, to screaming viloently down a pipe.
I love how they get squished longitudinally to give the appearance of superluminal velocities, except that's just the phase velocity. Still screaming especially violently of course
Fantastic to see your new machine!
Congrats on the new machine! Now I am really jealous.
Ohhhhhh shiny new toys! (happily spending the kids inheritance?) I understood most of the words in your descriptions, but some of the sentences threw me!
Keep up the good work!
Now that Project Narwhal (see the thumbnail for one of the components of that madcap scheme) is almost put to bed, I can get on with proper actual "making stuff" projects again. Being on the TV is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't pay well and the time investment is immense
Hi Neil, thank you for sharing. What a nice milling machine you have .. Keep up the good work 73 John PA7JB
Cheers mate! I bit the apple several years back. X7. Have fun!
Good choice! Sadly the bigger models wouldn't fit through the oak-framed doorway into my barn
Have you seen AvE's "town pump" CNC, ie:everyone gets a shot! 😬
Send him in a decent idea, he polishes up the prototype for you and sends you the sample plus the updated files for a sensible price for us makers, perhaps you might find yourself doing something similar? :)
And he makes it available to his local friends, and they in return chuck in their big fancy equivalent priced tool, and once half a dozen of them got together they had a *serious* workshop :)
I sort-of do that, but the ideas are usually in the form of an antenna component or mount or something, so I run up a design and use Patreon/Kofi contributions to cover the materials and postage. At the moment, I'm very VERY short of time, I was up until 5am today working on something for an upcoming BBC2 TV program. Sounds like a great idea though. Several of the big Chinese fab shops want me to do sponsored vids, so maybe if they will offer a decent discount, I could work up a viable design and if it's OK, the maker could then order a batch from them direct with a discount code. Right now though, I need to catch up with commercial work to justify spending the grandchildren's inheritance on a killer robot
I'd love to see you do a collab w/ Huygens Optics.
Now THERE's a channel I totally adore! The project for television has eaten every spare moment for several months, now I need to build my views back up so I can get back into a good publishing cadence and think about some collabs. I'm working on one right now, but it's part of Project Narwhal, so I can't talk about the details until the TV broadcast happens. I have two other collabs in the pipeline as well.
@@MachiningandMicrowavesI'll be waiting with baited breath!
I was intrigued when you mentioned the similarities to optics, and thought immediately of* the software he shows on his channel.
When you showed your roughing cut (fixture failure) I'd thought you were making a Fresnel lens....
My father worked in optics, radar and radio. I was always intrigued with synthetic aperture and other beam forming techniques.
@@jimurrata6785 Phased arrays and particularly mechanically-operated reflectarrays are on the agenda for next year, along with metamaterials and frequency-selective surfaces.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Repurposing a microlens array or starting from scratch? (I'm a scrounger 😄)
Intrigued. So glad I found your channel.
I like the way you play.
I have been doing some phased array Ku-band radar work recently. I am used to software that can cost $10,000. I got a quote from Ansys for their HFSS suite. I nearly passed out when they told me $100,000 plus support costs. Sometimes real world testing is cheaper. Even if it is tens of thousands of dollars.
Brilliant bastard, hah! All good luck to your endeavors
I've always wondered how much the surface smoothness affects microwave emmitors and such, I know it's all electromagnetic radiaton like light is but is it as sensitive to roughness? 🤔
1/20 of a wavelength is just about good enough, similar to high quality optics. Even 1/10th wavelength works OK. Scattering from surface roughness is a definite problem as you get to wavelengths of a millimetre
Undermentioned advantages of CAD in my opinion - it scales between component and system level information; and the reduction in the cost of revision.
I used to work in oil and gas infrastructure design. Database driven CAD was getting to the point where mechanical 3D design was being completed/ updated in relation to the process design so it was harder to make mistakes.
I had to stop sketching even simple piping drawings by hand. It always seems like it’ll be fine, and then you get more information - 15 min to make one update in a computer file vs. a couple hours to redo a hand sketch.
@@JamesDriver40 Generating designs directly from mathematical representations was the main driver for me. Making an asymmetric secant-squared dielectric body or an axially-displaced ellipse body of rotation directly from algebraic equations adds immensely to my creative process.
Did you factor that stress based life expectancy reduction, from the time spend hovering over the start cycle button, into the overall part cost 😆
I tend to sit staring into the abyss with one finger on the cycle stop button and another on emergency stop. The 12mm x 8mm slot milled into the moving hardened prismatic jaw of that Gerardi vice is a testament to how enthusiastic the machine can be.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves yeah, not watching too closely is the only real way to cope 😄. I find most of the time the first failure alert is an audible change. A small jaw tickle is a good outcome... at least in contrast to the alternative of bending machine parts!
I'd love to hear more about what you do with your parts once you've made them. What does the hobby entail? Is it Ham radio but at higher frequencies? Do you observe satellites?
@@qwertyface there are people who use satellites and of course there are quite a lot of amateur radio satellites. There is a Geo stationary satellite called QO100 with a transponder using an uplink at 2.4 GHz and a downlink at 10 GHz. I prefer to think of satellites as passive reflectors, so I bounce signals off the solar panels of the international space station and low Earth orbit satellites as well as aircraft. A lot of the transmission modes are designed to work right at the limits of what is possible using digital modulation. There's also quite a lot of digital television work being done and the satellite also support that. I also make parts for radio telescopes and particularly the people who like to monitor the satellites in the deep space network around 8.4 GHz. I'm also working on imaging radar systems. I been messing about with radio since I was nine years old back in the 1960s and it's kept me completely fascinated for all that time. But then Professor Hannah Fry has it exactly right. in her words, I am the biggest nerd she's ever met.
I didn't understand half of what you said here but as a machinist I did enjoy the CNC side of things. CNC mills are very expensive (as are all of the CNC range, second-hand or not) but wonderful machines, and I'm not surprised you are enjoying using one.
Not familiar with Syril as a brand, but there are a lof of new brands around these days.
I first became aware of the previous generation of SYIL machines when they sent one to Naomi Wu, but then I saw there was a UK agent and the dimensions of the all-new X5 were just enough to get one into my machine shop with 13 mm to spare between the floor and the 8x8 inch oak beam above the door. None of the other low-cost (!) machines would fit, and the barn was thrown together with no foundations, terrible bricks and sandy mortar, plus it was cracked by the earthquake we had near Market Rasen some years ago. I like the way the SYIL is "Assembled in China" from parts that are from many countries. It feels like I could carry out repairs even if the supplier ceased trading. They made a commitment to maintain supplies of spare parts for all their machines long-term, and I thought that was a good sign. It's reasonably fast, reasonably accurate, reasonably powerful and reasonably priced. Yeah, I'd like a Heimle or something, but that would need a lottery win
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I'll have to check out the Syil range, they sound reasonable. Haas do some decent small CNC mills but still not cheap by any means.
Heimle? Yeah, definitely lottery win territory. 😁
I couldn't fit a Haas through the doorway, it would have needed me to remove that lovely oak beam that I installed 30 years ago. The long-term costs of a Haas were a bit of a problem unless I was going to get a guaranteed level of income from job-shop work or one of the online brokerages like Xometry or Protolabs. I don't want to take on any long-term contractual support costs. I like that I can write macro code for the machine, although I'd like to have more access to APIs so I can write utilities that access the machine over ethernet. Probably safer if I don't fiddle though, and treat this as a black box that just works.
I like where this is going!
I wish I knew where it was going!
This is gonna be good!
Bold. I love it.
You could look into monocrostaline dimond tooling for mirror finishes on your dishes straight out of the mill.
Don't get me wrong, I never used these (lack of an industrial cnc milling machine for starters), but heard some good things about them.
I've considered cubic boron nitride and PCD inserts for mirror-finish turning, but not for the mill. The costs are ludicrous of course. It might be worthwhile for experiments on 30 THz (10 micrometres) far-infrared that a number of experimenters in the UK are working on. I don't know if the 1 micrometre steps on the axes and spindle of the SYIL are small enough to make it worth going for diamond/CBN tooling. A real high-end machine has steps down below 100 nanometres, so there are no visible cusps. I think I need to work up to that sort of level of perfection very gently. Could be very interesting for vacuum deposition on to aluminium and copper machined surfaces
CNC machining is both challenging and satisfying, I am confident with this machine you will slow atrophy of you brain and live a longer happier life “making things”
I really need a 4th/5th axis and a Renishaw-style probe, but that is all really serious money and I'd have to do a lot of production work to help pay for the upgrades, plus the additional Fusion licence upgrades. Not keen on the idea of turning into a production job-shop
Here is the origin of the expression “one of,” as in the engineer sending a drawing downstairs with a note reading “make one of these, we’ll see if it fits.”
I'm sure it has already occurred to you but I've had a lot of success 3D Printing fixtures for machining. The combination saves a whole heap of time, cost & thinking!
I'd be interested in more of a review of your Mill. I looked at Syil a few years ago - but didn't trust the reviews at the time. I ended up buying a used Bridgeport Interact. However, I'd still like something smaller & more modern.
The older SYILs were not brilliant, but these are made from decent parts from many countries, and the massive epoxy-granite frame makes a big difference. I'm using the Bambu X1C to make fixtures for the CNC already, see at 10:02 although I'm mainly making softjaws from aluminium, steel and Delrin. I'll certainly be using a lot more 3D printed parts for fixturing. As you say, it's a great shortcut and reducer of brain strain
Titans of CNC just had a video of aluminum machining on SYIL machine, using some fancy diamond bit, perfect mirror finish on a pretty organic shaped part.
Thanks very much for the heads-up. I haven't watched that one yet. PCD and CBN are not ridiculously expensive, unlike monocrystalline diamond. I was talking to my supplier about some boron nitride tooling last week. I'll take a look at young master Gilroy's offering tomorrow. Cutwel do sell single-crystal diamond tooling, but the price is right off the scale.
I adapted a FANUC postprocessor for the SYIL to run as a vertical lathe, with tools in a gang fixture in the vice and the part in a chuck in the spindle. The finish using lapped carbide insert lathe tooling was pretty close to a mirror, so way better than needed for sub-1 THz parts, but I couldn't get chips to form, it was all stringy and caused problems with fouling the tool. Maybe I should have driven the tool harder and used a smaller corner radius.
I'd draw the line at single tools costing more than $200 I think, but if they could do a 3 or 4 mm diamond tool with decent reach inside a non-circular cavity, with a corner radius, that could be very useful.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I think the material / product was called MCD, some monocrystaline diamond type material. Impressive results - but as you suggested, at a impressive price most likely :)
@@SarahKchannel The cutters from my tooling supplier are priced between 1500 GBP and 6000 GBP. Maybe OK for a university lab, aerospace contractor or high-end optics supplier, but a little outside my comfort zone right now. Still going to watch what Titan and his team have to say. Underneath the showmanship, they are solid.
1:03 I always hate going through research papers, they really don't like getting to the point and there tends to be endless fluff before you actually find what you are looking for.
I have a curated feed of academic papers that weeds out some of the rubbish, but only as a source of ideas and inspiration. I can skim-read academic papers rapidly, but even so, getting to the really interesting stuff is painful. Some PhD theses are very worthwhile as sources of ideas, but a lot of them are not really deep dives, despite being 100 pages long. I tend to follow the papers done by interesting lead researchers, who put their name to lots of interesting papers by their colleagues and postgrads
@@MachiningandMicrowaves yes some are really useful and some topics are easier to sift through than others, I'm rather technical and don't have issue finding the info I need in most cases but when I need to dive into specific topics like designing simple optical systems for telescopes, it's very hard to find good explanations on these relationships.
I am assuming that is 5000lb and not £5000 with that kit! You are a man of dedication 👍
Yeah, I'm going a bit American about using pounds instead of tonnes/tons. It's a fair bit over 2000 kg. Costs to date including tooling, holders, vices, inverters/converters, fluids and accessories, plus fancy new Hydrovane compressors, refrigerant air-drying, building works and installation costs don't leave much change out of £45k, but that's all sunk cost and I'm ignoring any thoughts about making it pay for itself. I'd have frittered the money away on testgear or a van or antennas or a new car anyway.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I was assuming around 50k and if you can't spend your money on the things you want at our age when can you?!!? During my brother in law's army service in his youth he visited many places that he always intended to go back to in order to actually _see_ them. This just never happened, so he spent decades working away and never taking holidays, so when he finally retired (one false start... just a couple more contracts... honest) he realised that he had a massive nest egg and nothing to do with it. His solution was to find a partner and take at least 4 holidays a year, and it has served him very well. If you hang onto it then it just goes into the pockets of the care provider company directors and shareholders when you finally become incapable of independent living, so enjoy it while you can.
I want to flatten the sticker on your mic stand! (okay back to watching the video)
I cannot believe I didn't use one of the vinyl stickers. I filmed that a few weeks ago and noticed immediately I edited the previous video. Now it's MUCH shinier!
Congratulations on the mill.
Also, with proper fixturing you can mill your printed parts and save them
I haven't tried, but I guess I could so some interesting thing on stiff materials. I'm using a lot of CF-PLA at the moment, not sure how that would machine, guess I need to find out!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves uncoated endmills are best for the cuts. Just look at the material and what you're doing when gripping it. Using plugs to reinforce from flex works a treat
I have some fancy single-flute lapped carbide cutters intended for plastics and laminates, including some that are down-cutting. Lots to think about!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves on the right path. I've always respected manual machinist because it's such a dark art and backlash actually helps so much. CNC is a bit different with antibacklash. Helps, but hinders sometimes.
Great video, many thanks.
I picked up some aluminium toolplate discs that were offcuts from a company that made roulette tables, basically these were the holes left over from machining the tables, they were in 1 1/4" aluminium toolplate and perfect for making a 12" pulley, so it may be worth looking around your area for companies that make stuff and have waste- while I was collecting, I noticed their scrap bins alo had 24" aluminium discs, I actually found them by searching for aluminium discs on ebay (i am in Kent UK and the company I found was in Chartham)
I do have an arrangement with a local fabrication company, but there isn't a lot of metal industry other than sheet metal fabrication in this area. The local agricultural merchant has a small workshop in day sometime let me have bits of metal that came off tractors and harvesters.
That machine is very nice!
It's "assembled in China" rather than "made in China", they've used excellent parts from several countries, and so far, the engineering seems to be way better than the price point would suggest. Let's see how it works in 5 years!
The diy audio world would love to have you if you got into it!
Yikes, your AMS is reporting very high humidity - if you haven't already removed the original dessicant bags from it I'd do so now, they have a tendency to leak water once they get saturated!
I'd had the AMS in bits to clear out some jammed bits. The filament had been in the dryer, or was freshly opened, and I'd just fitted new dessicant bags. An hour later, it stopped complaining! Very well spotted!
I've machined hundreds if not thousands of variations and full production runs of similar parts for the GBT receivers as well as the NGVLA and VLA and many more, just the ones off the top of my head. Frankly I'm a machinist and not an astro physicist like my father so I don't always know what I'm making, but as a I typically do one offs I always make two of whatever I happen to be making as the setup and machine time to make the second after the first part is done is inconsequential. The telescopes these were designed for are a fair bit bigger, I wonder if any of the stuff I have an actual spare part for is useful to you. On a side note when we created these parts that were sometimes phase shifter too small for ID machining even with custom ground machine tools or just features that were ucnmachineable, we would machine the inverse of the part out of aluminum and grow copper on it for weeks and weeks until the copper was thick enough to machine again. Then we would machine mounting features into the copper, finish the exterior of the rough grown copper, and drill out the majority of the aluminum we could reach but as there were often internal square fins we would then dissolve the rest of the aluminum in Galium or some sort of acid I believe, and then Gold plate the finished copper part. Just something to think about for a potential process for parts you may have thought were impossible to machine but had ideal RF properties. If you have any questions I'd be happy to help as much as I can!
I've been using potassium tetrahydroxozincate as an oxide strip to leave a layer of zinc on machined aluminium mandrels with 0.5 mm wide grooves about 2mm deep. After a while in the zincate, I rinse the mandrel and immerse it into a sodium dicyanoaurate bath with the electrolysis power turned on. The zinc dissolves immediately and a layer of gold starts getting deposited on to the bare unoxidised aluminium surface. Once I have a decent layer of gold, I go straight to a slow copper plating bath to try to build up an electroformed copper body with the grooves now being ridges. Once I have enough copper built up, I grip the mandrel in the lathe or mill and remove any excess material and give me a way to grip it, then drill or bore away as much of the aluminium as I can, then it goes into a warm, agitated sodium hydroxide bath to dissolve the rest of the and aluminium. I love the idea of using gallium! Next step is to set the resulting copper negative into an epoxy fill inside a machined metal body. That saves a bit of time, but assumes I've got enough plating to form flanges and stiffening ribs.
I'm getting a lot of failures where the deposited fins are crumbling, I suspect because the slots in the aluminium are closing up at the top and leaving pockets of electrolyte inside the fins. I need to try with 1mm slots, then slice and polish the plated mandrel longitudinally. I hadn't though of doing the gold plating after dissolving the aluminium. I found an article from one of the US university labs but I've lost it. I've read the papers by Canning staff and of course I have the Canning book, from 1982 (23rd edition). I'd love to find that piece from the engineer at the university lab (Caltech maybe?).
As always, I have No Idea What I'm Doing, but near-infinite resolve and zero fear of failure.
What was the accident?
It involved a septic tank, a pressure washer, half a gallon of boiling water spilled on my left hand, my ankles getting tangled in the pressure hoses, causing me to do a spectacular fall, resulting in a high-speed impact with a brick wall with my right arm, an urgent visit to the emergency room burns specialists, and a HUGE contusion. My right arm was black from my palm to my bicep. A LOT of ouchies were involved. Superb service from the National Health Service throughout my recovery. Sadly it is not on video and the photos are WAAAAY to gruesome for RUclips. Think Zombie Apocalypse. Almost fully healed now apart from some nerve damage and rotator cuff issues.
2/10 would not recommend
Thanks Neil. Shiny! Funny looking lathe for making mostly axisymmetric parts :) I was wondering if you'd splashed out on some EM software that you could do parametric sweeps - mind you without a steep discount you could spend as much on that as the mill and it probably wouldn't be as much fun let's be honest.
I'm using scripted parametric sweeps with OpenEMS, that's about my only option unless one of the EM solver vendors takes pity on me and sponsors me with a free licence!
I would recommend getting some ETP eco grip in your most used endmill sizes ( since it's basicly a ER collet to hydraulic adapter ( you use the same holder but throw the coller itself and the nut away) so higher grip. Better damping and the ETP you can dile in the runout of the tool. Makeing it way better then a normal ER collet
And for that taper in the horn I would make the finish path go from the bottom up instead of top down. That way the absolute "center/middle " of the tool which basically don't spin isn't in contact with the material and should give you a slightly better finish at no extra cost in anyway ( except for the "brown spot" factor )
Btw does it have through spindle cooling ?
Sadly, no through-spindle coolant, which means I can't use a coolant-driven turbine spindle speeder to get the 75,000 rpm I need for the smallest tools (unless I can work out a safe way to run a high pressure coolant line into an intermediate holder).
I was about to buy some shrink collets as I have an induction heater, but those ETPs look interesting, especially with having the adjustment screws. Kind of expensive, and some of the smaller tooling has 3mm or 4mm shanks. Might be excellent for the 8/10/12 mm tools though.
I tried bottom up on those tapers using a tool with a small corner radius and the finish was excellent. I just had to do some careful work to get a smooth transition above the corner of the step. I'm trying some modelling to see if I can use a smooth curve at the transition, and do a finish cut using a corner-radius endmill all the way. The step is where the additional TE mode is excited, so that the sidelobes of the antenna are suppressed. The phase velocity of the higher mode is different, the plan it to get them to arrive at the orifice with exactly the correct phase relationship to give the best possible cancellation of sidelobes, while ensuring that the axial ratio minimised, so the beam is symmetric. Of course, with the CNC, I could set up a pallet with 8 or more of the horns and machine different corner radii and throat lengths, then measure the actual results. That would help validate the models.
At this point, my mother is going to say "seems like a lot of messing about just to talk to your friends on the radio". She watches this channel. Hi mum!!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves i dont know the price of them but i do know that NSK America corporation sell high speed( up to 80000 rpm ) electric in spindle motor's
and for the ETP you can put some heat shrink sleeves/ectension on any tool thats smaller then 12mm ( so you only buy 12mm ones and then addapt all the smaller tools to fit into the 12mm holder ( maybe even turn those sleeves/extensions youself on your lathe. so long that the hole and outside is turned in the same setup they should easily be within +-0.0005mm of runout )
btw if the surface finish have any effect on how the horn works and you need a extremely smooth surface finish then i will recommend picking up some MCD diamond braced end mill's. or if you just need/want to make something with a little more bling/shine to them ( though they are only for non magnetic/ no steel material. like copper.aluminium.plastic.titanium and that kind of stuff )
My respects good sir.
Generally diy machines tend to be cheaper such as the printnc, but they do require a lot of fiddling to get up and running. The full blown machines like you've got there probably make sense if your selling something your making as the cost of the machine as you've said is very large.
I should be able to recoup the capital cost of the machine in less than 3 years doing high-value low-volume work, but I've just been beaten to market on one product, and I'm not going to compete on price. I'm going up-market, with silver and gold plating and only looking at a small proportion of the market. Most CNC shops would think of the X5 as a tiny machine, but the thing weighs more than two tons
Dope, very very cool
If you ever need amything at all Feel free to reach out, tools, programming, or just someone to bounce your thoughts off of! Id love to have a convo sometime, just found the channel and im immersing myself in your world. Very impressive!
I would say" Go for it". But I see you already do that :)
@@Rustinox Hi Michel, now I want a CNC Shaper!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I would like to CNC a shaper, but I have to find a good machine first. With a hydraulic ram.
Oh yes, now that would be something to see! Hope you find one.
Have you thought about taking up golf?
"A good walk, spoiled" as Mark Twain didn't say...
Now buy you self small furnace to re-melt failed designs and chips to cast brand new stock in moulds ;)
I have a propane/waste oil furnace that is OK for melting aluminium, bronze and copper, and an induction machine that is good for smaller parts. My supply of scrap engines and other aluminium parts has dried up. I need to get my trailer repaired so I can go out on the scrounge for suitable scrap for larger castings. Definitely worth making new bar stock from offcuts and wrecked parts though, so long as I can perfect my fluxing and dross-removal skills!
I am a gear head, always into nice gear to try out and tinker with. Subtractive or additive modeling including CAD is unchartered land for me. Your content is very interesting though. I don't get the IRL use for your builds. You design and construct antennas for microwave radio, is that it? What's the actual application for those? Is it RX or TX or both? Would you please give a hint to one of your videos, so I could get more behind your activity? Thanks a lot!
I've been a bit inscrutable about how I use these things, mostly because a lot of what I make is used by other folks around the world. My key interests are in pushing the limits of communication via moonbounce/earth-moon-earth reflection, rain/snow/hail forward scatter (Mie/Rayleigh), aircraft as passive over-the-horizon reflectors, satellite communications, using larger LEO sats and the International Space Station as passive reflectors, troposcatter, tropospheric ducting, structure/geology reflections, mmWave imaging, deep space network satellite monitoring and generally pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible in microwave/mmWave/infra-red/optical communications. I'll try to show some of the usage in upcoming videos
@@MachiningandMicrowaves thank you! I f I knew my maths I would take lots of joy in trying how far I could think things like the ones you mentioned… It’s always a pleasure to have people „around“ who are smarter thinkers than oneself, I reckon. So, please give us insights into your world!👍🏻
I created a second channel for deep dives into the maths and physics, but time pressures beat me. I really should do some vids about the process and science, with very little editing or fancy graphics. Too much Stuff To Do right now though
@@MachiningandMicrowaves ready to watch the content when ever you are, Sir!💛🍀
Nice CNC. I guess the patent on Fanuc Robodrill tool changer expired?
I've no idea. But Brother Speedios have used the same style for a long time (maybe just licensed it?).
I can't remember the name of the manufacturer of the toolchanger. It's motor-driven and works fairly well, I've had a couple of minor issues with tools sticking in the taper and making quite a thump when they come out, but a tiny smear of grease helps, and it's only happening before the spindle warms up properly, so now I run the daily warm-up cycle before changing any tools. Just need to remember to leave a suitable tool in the spindle when shutting down
@@MachiningandMicrowaves They've been around a long time, so probably expired. Does the tool changer engage a gear on spindle when changing? That's how the Fanuc rotates the changer. Most people will argue to never leave a tool in the spindle, keep it perfectly clean, and don't add any lubrication as you never want it to have a change to move and wear.
@@clytle374 the changer has its own motor drive but it has a cam which is operated by moving the spindle above the zero position. It isn't possible to leave the spindle empty unless you leave one position on the changer empty. There is a gentle air bleed to keep chips out of the bottom of the spindle, but there is also an air blast, which is designed to clear any chips from inside the taper or on the tool holder itself. I'm going to try leaving one position on the changer empty to see if that solve those rather alarming clunks as the ramp changes the first tool holder after a cold start. I cleaned the grease off the tapers of the tool holders and spindle now and there's just a light smear on the pool stud and the grooves where the mounting forks engage
Did you get 3 phase power to your shop? Can you still afford retirement?
@@sparc5 I have two other pensions, and I am still working part time as an IT security architect and data network engineer I bought a 10 hp solid state inverter and sinewave filter, but the excessive earth leakage current during start-up of some of the solid state controllers in the X5 caused a breaker to trip. The resulting transient destroyed one channel on the inverter. The supplier had never heard of this failure before, so I purchased a second unit because I needed to get the X5 up and running. That also blew up with a different fault, so I purchased a rotary converter that is horribly noisy but entirely bulletproof.
Probably my ADHD has kicked in, but I haven't pursued the supplier yet. The electricity supplier wanted around £11,000 to make the connection for three phase. The noise from the rotary converter limits what I can do about machining late into the night but might actually be a good thing, but I've lost over £3000 as a result of this mess
@@MachiningandMicrowaves ouch! Not a cheap hobby. Another thing that occurred to me when watching is how you're just picking up CAD and CNC. Each of these has such a steep learning curve that is probably lost on your audience. I'm glad you decided to include the part of you breaking the bit so we didn't get the impression you're superhuman.
@@sparc5 i've been very clear with myself so that I don't have any wild dreams of becoming a profitable job shop. I've only spent money that I can afford to lose, I haven't borrowed a cent to fund any of my new toys. This was all about shortening the development cycle and allowing me to make what would otherwise be expensive mistakes, in the privacy of my own workshop.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves yes. I kept waiting to hear the part where you recoup your pension and it never came. Makes sense to spend the money, you can't take it with you.
A friend of mine started with early signs of dementia, and had some other age-related mobility issues. She'd lived her life extremely well, doing everything she could as she knew there was a good change that her genetics would come to bite her. Before things got terrible, she got her affairs fully in order, ordered some materials from the dark web, wrote a lot of letters and emails, and left this life on her own terms. I hope I have the strength of will to emulate her if I go the same way. My mum is 94 and still going strong as ever though, and my gran lived to be 101 and my uncle into his 90s, but those two had dementia, so I'm just going for it, flat out while I can.
Nice work. What kind of radios are you using with the 24 & 40 GHz stuff. Transverters?
@@rfengr00 Kuhne transverters on 24 and 47GHz, plus some Wavelab units on 24.
I have a 3 m solid prime focus - 2.4 and 1.8 meter solid offset but I am unlikely to be able to communicate via the moon on 24 GHz without a lot more power. Maybe just combining the outputs from four wave lab units would be sufficient if I use the largest dish . A 3 m dish on 24 GHz is really too large to illuminate the moon effectively, so I'll probably start with the 2.4 offset and keep the three meter dish for 3.4, 5.7 and 10 GHz.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves where did you obtain the 3 m prime focus?
@@rfengr00 it used to be on top of a BBC building in Belfast I think. It's branded General Dynamics.
Does it mean you're going to manage having decent WiFi coverage at home? Slightly joking, I wish I had some directional 2.4GHz antenna for wifi
Heh heh, I have gigabit fibre into the machine shop and 5 GHz wifi everywhere now. I have a 1 metre dish and feed on 2.4 GHz that puts a decent signal into the geostationary satellite QO-100 at 36,000 km above Qatar using 800 mW, so range isn't a problem! I'm working on some omnidirectional lens antennas for the 5 GHz wifi, perhaps I should do one for 2.4 GHz with a tailored pattern to improve coverage down my garden. Have to stay within the legal limits, but if I can put some deep nulls on the access points/routers in my neighbours' houses, that might improve throughput on the lowband wifi channels.
My grandfather use to be in you hobby but was old-school doing it all by hand, this is oddly like like chatting with him throughout my childhood. Anyway I'm wondering if surface finish/quality would have a effect? Question as a odd watchmaker.
It comes down to scattering and surface conduction losses. Very similar to getting mirror finishes on optical equipment. I aim for 1/20th of a wavelength RMS error, so at 122 GHz, with 2.4 mm wavelength, that's over 100 micrometres across the whole surface. I like to get better than that locally, especially inside waveguide bores, where scattering can cause unwanted TE/TM modes as well as losses. Even so, a 5 micrometre finish is good enough. Professional pride makes me want to do better if I can though, especially if I'm using gold overplating
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I just found a plating video you have I might have some sujestions on plating in the features/pits/grooves depending on your if you want from my industry. As for plastic covers that are transparent vacuum molded should be a good shout as I asked a friend in the industry who gave me two hours of lessons on the phone. Again I can expand if it would help, but you seem very well versed in manufacturing and your hobby. It's been very nice following you videos so far. Thank you. My grandfather would have loved your channel.
I was thinking about the old vacuum forming machine I used in the 1970s and whether there's a non-polar thermoplastic sheet material that is UV resistant with negligible water absorption and a loss tangent less than about 0.005. GRP is the usual solution, but HDPE and polycarbonate are reasonable solutions. I've machined some from PTFE, but that's a very expensive solution
@@MachiningandMicrowaves from what I remember there's a few thermo plastics that will do the trick though I'm afraid I will have to ask for that list on my friends next day off. Though I used to know the owner of the company who made the drums that covered the old mobile phone antennas, the big round ones from the days of blackberry and Nokia. I'll have to reconnect as its been a long time since he moved to Bulgaria and I lost a brilliant client. But that said I remember him telling me about the process, exact heating to ensure equal thinning over the whole drum for strength and transparency. His company was the only one that could do this in Europe at the time. It was fascinating. It's been decades since I have used a vacuum mold it was one of my favourite toys for prototyping. I'll do my best to get back to you soon with information feel free to contact me I'm longterm ill so this is the first brain workout for a long time so having fun.
I have some polyethylene injection-moulded covers used for telephone joints by British Telecom, they are quite transparent to microwaves and they are very close to a half-wave thick after allowing for the relative permittivity of the material, so have no effect on the radiation pattern. Styrene sheets (sometimes called high-impact polystyrene) are excellent RF dielectrics, but I think their UV survival might be limited. PVC is pretty disastrous, it crumbles to powder after a few years in sunlight. PE plumbing pipes work well, but I'd really like to have the ability to create my own shapes and sizes
I am curious how all of this would translate to 3D metal printing, or fused deposition printing.
I've been talking to a 3D metal fab about a sponsorship deal but they don't offer high conductivity materials, plus there are complex shrinkage metrics to deal with and it's unclear how hollow forms like waveguides or resonant cavities would behave at the corners. Maybe if printed at an angle to limit overhang? Getting a sufficiently conductive and smooth internal finish to prevent scattering will be challenging, and getting plating to adhere evenly inside concave voids will be hard as a hard thing. Electropolishing will be similarly challenging. I'm thinking mostly about using that technology for extremely complex geometries that support other components, like gimbals and handles and solid-looking metal parts that have lattices internally. At lowish frequencies, the tolerances and finishes might be acceptable, but the parts would be very large. Copper, silver, or at a pinch, aluminium, would be good materials, 316 stainless or bronzes, less so
@@MachiningandMicrowaves hence me being curious - I know very little about RF, a bit more about 3D printing.. but nothing at this level.
Honeycomb or iso-grid structures, like the support of a fish seem like logical candidates - yet metal 3D printing is most offered on smalish part, nothing
like dish shaped structures.
Yet some of the sintered prints machine quit OK for finishing passes.
@@SarahKchannel The application I'm considering is a reflectarray, where you have a large number of individual curved hexagonal facets, each with a set of three mounts which are driven by small actuators so you can modify the direction of the beam of the "dish" and sweep it rapidly without having to move massive stiff structures. The other application I'd love to try is waveguide combiners, where you have eight or more rectangular hollow tubes of varying heights, which have input waveguide flanges and which are then merged in a sort of tree structure, inside a solid matrix. T radio frequency energy sent into each port combines in phase and appears out of the output port with almost 8 times the power. There is a serious limit to the amount of power a single device can produce at those frequencies, so a combiner like that is a simple, passive solution to achieve better output power. Milling them from solid is a nightmare job because you can't have joints other than along the broad faces, so it isn't at all easy to get the mechanical arrangement right. A 3D printed version could have a complex interweave of curved tubes to minimise the envelope of the entire structure
I wonder if fronel lenses would be able to be assembled per facet, rather than as a solid piece.
I think that would work, so long as the alignment was good. Perhaps using dovetails or dowels or something, or even a dielectric glue or cement. Perhaps if I can find a source of Rexolite 1422 offcuts, that might work with polystyrene cement
@@MachiningandMicrowaves with a dragon scale type pattern of facets, you should be able to get away with far smaller pieces of source materials, and even have the options of different materials per scale. im sure that could lead to some interesting new toys to play with :P
@@zutai1 that's an interesting thought and it's sort of leading the way towards making an adaptive reflectarray, with each scale on a flexure with tiny actuators. I've been thinking a lot about radio telescopes using large phased arrays, but I only have a little more than 1 acre of land and I think it would be much more effective to work with other folks on a VLBI array approach with a baseline of maybe 100 km. That does start to cause difficulties of clock distribution though. Getting a sufficiently stable distributed clock system using GPS-disciplined rubidium clocks or even high stability quartz master oscillators like my Morion MV-89a system in its triple-oven vibration-isolated and magnetically shielded enclosure might be good enough for baselines of tens of km. So many project ideas, so little time...
@MachiningandMicrowaves I wonder about using a ditect line of sight coms between nodes for calibration, rather than only GPS or the like. Combined with a faceted franel lens, they should have good enough timing signals, even if you have to bounce it off the atmosphere.
There are problems with scintillation even on links in the 100km range, but the alternative is hydrogen masers or direct dark fibre. I must remember to buy lottery tickets. I think that with a baseline the size of a county or a small country, it might be possible to use some very well-isolated GPS disciplined oscillators with maybe a 0.01 mHz (yes, millihertz) loop bandwidth to apply long-term stabilisation, but relying on the oscillators themselves for stability and lack of jitter and noise over scales from 100 ns to 10 s. I need to talk to some nearby amateur radio astronomers. Conveniently, I know one of the folks at a nearby astronomy association who have their own small observatory. Project for next year I think. I already have the DiFX correlation/sync code (see www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/difx/difxuserguide.pdf)
Well... you're certainly one of only a few hobbyists, who'd go this way. I'd better build the machine myself and enjoy my pension 😄
I might convert my lathe using LinuxCNC, I have a very nice 750 watt servomotor, and the inverter for the spindle motor has a control input, so I should be able to get constant surface speed over a range of diameters. Just need a second motor and a way to link into the Spherosyn scales on the old lathe. I think I prefer to burn my time making parts rather than the perfectly valid time-burning alternative of building or converting a mill to CNC
I wonder “ mark each one with its particular parameters “ , just an excuse to play with the engraving function? 😁
I feel so SEEN! Yes, it's just an excuse to play. It's super useful though, as a 0.25 mm difference in pin offset is hard to see by eye
@@MachiningandMicrowaves I’d probably do the same myself, nice work!
Wow you are brave but I can definitely see the attraction as I too have a manual lathe and mill. Over and above learning how to drive the damned thing all the tooling worries me as it seems inordinately expensive even from China. I dont make anything like RF stuff so I think if Im going down the path of CNC I will start with a laser cutter, something that will cut thin metal would be my dream
I just had an offer of a fibre MOPA laser unit, but it doesn't cut metal foil. I use my Creality laser to make assembly fixtures, boxes and all sorts of things that I never expected. I have a manual plasma cutter but I'd certainly like to have a CNC plasma table for cutting plate. Wire EDM is the other thing I would like to have available.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yes wire EDM is incredible, I have a friend with one but the setup etc and keeping it running is on a whole other level, you really need access to pretty good metrology gear. I do have access to a similar laser for plastics and rubber etc but I really want metal and its quite a lot more expensive
Did you fire Amy?!! 😮This is the second video without her teasing you
Complicated reasons. These two vids were made to replace lectures that I was going to present at the Microwave Update conference in Vancouver. For complicated and boring reasons, my flight got messed up and I couldn't get there in time without spending a fortune on new tickets, so I made the two vids and did a live Q&A afterwards. I wasn't sure whether the esteemed and distinguished audience at the conference were ready for a snarky avatar pointing out my abundant shortcomings and mistakes, so invoked a temporary firewall rule as an AIMEE-suppressant. The dilithium crystals can't sustain that level of shielding for much longer, so I suspect the Return of the Snark is imminent...
Oh wow thats a nice machine...
Considering they're going for like $300.... You might consider making "Steelsticks" for the Nintendo 64 controller. Slowly making back the money spent lol
@@Sugar3Glider That's an interesting idea for certain. I'm working hard on finishes and packaging and branding and all of the annoying side quests that appears as soon as you try to make the hobby into a business.
I have an addon that lets me sort youtube channel subscriptions by categories, I've added you to my machinist subscription group.
Thanks! I need something like that to keep my favourite channel niches together.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves It's an addon called 'pocket tube"
@@jmd1743 Ta, I'll take a peep
Always like you're video's. I have very similar kit but a different set of esoteric hobbies. You should consider a resin printer to prototype some parts. Bit of a learning curve for precision prints and unfortunately the curve is very different than filament printers. Haven't had to metal coat resin yet, figure plan B would be vacuum sputtering if some electroless method didn't work.
Cheers-Peter
After the deep dive I did into industrial resin printers when I visited Fortify and Rogers Corp in the US for the ruclips.net/video/3YMRfw0uWlw/видео.html video, the affordable hobbyist+ resin machines feel a bit limited. I keep getting offers of machines for free, but I don't feel I'd get enough use from one at the moment. If I start to do a lot of centrifugal casting, that might change. Sadly, there isn't really an economically-viable material that could be used to make gradient index lenses on a resin printer. If I can get the controller for my turbomolecular pump running, I'll be doing some PVD and simple sputtering. I don't know how resins would behave in terms of outgassing under vacuum, and whether a metal coating would remain attached and take an electroformed/plated overlayer. It would be fun finding out though
@@deuterium8236 Ben Krasnow has some interesting videos on sputtering/vapor deposition in the garage/shed.
It's a shame he has cut back on uploads but that probably means he's been working on some other outrageous projects.
Yep, there's a surprising number of folks making and using magnetron sources. On a different slant, I need to find a paper on cylindrical cold-cathode magnetron electron guns so get enough free electrons to make a few amps of current in a hard vacuum. The usual sources are intended to maximise ion production, I want to maximise electron production instead. Paywalls are everywhere and the usual tools don't seem to have them indexed. Not that I'd ever use such tools, obvs, no no no.
Did you also buy a sharpening machine for drills and cutters?
I have an Alexander D-bit grinder, but most of my tooling has inserts or is carbide with parabolic flutes or variable pitch, or is absolutely tiny, so it's very hard to grind them, even with diamond cup wheels. I rarely bother sharpening very small drills. I can grind split points by hand at 4mm up
Have you used the Fusion360 scripting features?
Where do you get the Material from?
Local metal stockholders mostly, Aalco, Smiths, Barugh. I buy large orders and get a reasonable deal. For odd small jobs, I use 1stchoicemetals.co.uk
Do you use straight water as coolant??
It's an 8% solution of Cutsol Crystal Cool fully synthetic coolant from Cutwel UK.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves 😲
I have that issue of the Beano.... 😁
Has anyone told you that you are one smart, talented person? When you say "cold sky noise" do you mean the Cosmic microwave background radiation?
One of the ways to measure antenna and radio system performance is to point the antenna at the sun or the moon, measure the amount of thermal noise, then point it at a patch of sky with very few active foreground sources. If you know the current solar flux index, You can then use the ratio of thermal noise power from the sun against that from an empty patch of sky. A bit of calculation and you can work out the equivalent noise temperature or the noise figure of your entire system. The Noise temperature of that patch of sky is dependent on the frequency where you're observing. It is usually considerably more than the cosmic microwave background, But usually 20 to 50 K. At some frequencies though the whole sky appears almost room temperature because of molecular absorption bands for water vapour and oxygen. I should make a video about that.
hahaha enjoy and make some chips! how do you like the machine?
So far, it seems like excellent value. Support from the factory has been splendid. One minor irritation is that you can't open the doors with the power off without climbing on top of the machine and messing with the latch. It means I'm unable to open the door late at night because I'm using a rather noisy rotary converter and it would disturb the neighbourhood. The lack of a manual release on the spindle is slightly irritating. I can only change to a new tool using the auto changer. The only other minor niggle is that I managed to press the wrong button when I was aiming to move the spindle upwards but drove it downwards into the workpiece, which was seated in the vice. The amount of pressure that was exerted by the tool shattered the corners of the flutes and pressed the core of the cutter into the workpiece quite impressively. The Z axis reported an overload and the machine stopped. The problem was that the Z axis force was now too great for the and ball screws to operate. There's no manual override and the tool was seated in the tool holder, so I couldn't simply release the colette. The only way I could remove the emergency stop condition was by using a hand drill and hacksaw to cut away the workpiece. That was half an hour of my life that I'll never get back. The lack of a coolant washdown hose is slightly irritating but fixable. The work envelope of approximately 10 inch cube it's the main limitation but as I couldn't get a larger machine through the door, that's a compromise I'll have to live with.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves wow thank you for sharing your experience. I also like to get a small machine and they seem good on paper but I never personally used them so your real user experience is well appreciated!
In my experience at least, CAD really only saves paper and pencils...and I question whether that's a good thing given that making and burying paper sounds like a pretty decent carbon sequestration strategy.
CAD hates me and it's mutual.
I took a while to get used to Fusion, it seems stupidly obtuse, but now it feels totally natural. I've changed! I'm going to look at other CAM code to see if there's any advantage. Some of the adaptive paths are not very clever, and there are irritating bits where I can hand-code the g code myself much more efficiently than the post-processor.
sometimes you just need to upgrade your tools.
Yeah, it just keeps happening. I can stop ANY TIME though , I'm not, like ADDICTED or anything...
what coolant are you using?
Cutsol Crystal Cool from Cutwel UK. I tried to get some Blaser fully-synth coolant, but couldn't even get a response to my sales enquiry. Terrible customer service. I really hate having to go through sales people when all I want is to buy a barrel of forbidden juice dammit. Especially when most of my shopping is done at 3 am on a Sunday morning. No excuse for not having an online shop surely?
@@MachiningandMicrowaves i guess you mean blaser synergy 735? we were advised (by our blaser dealer) not to use full synthetic because it may be hard on the seals of the machine and cause them to leak and eventually fail, that synergy 735 specifically leaves a very sticky residue, and that it's really only meant for specific alloys or it reacts with it and make the surface splotchy or something.
my boss wanted to try some zebora full synthetic for filming purposes, but because we've been using a mineral oil based emulsion coolant (also from blaser; multicool mc610) it was never going to be perfectly clear, even after flushing the system many times. stability-wise and odor-wise i've actually been pretty happy with mc610, no bacteria even though our machine sits around for weeks at a time and good surface finishes; it just doesn't look like water haha
full synth is supposedly also worse for your skin and general health than oil based coolants
@@ikbendusan my original reason was so that I could use a spinning disc camera enclosure and see-through to the workpiece through the supposedly clear solution. That all works fine until you have tools of any significant diameter which create a dense spray which scatter light even though it's transparent. I'll probably, use the rest of this 5 gallon drum and then look at alternatives. It is extremely well-behaved and the residue isn't particularly sticky but then I don't leave the machine idle for more than a day if I happen to be away. It's very easy to separate the tramp oil from the total loss way lubrication. I just use oil absorbent sheets on top of the coolant tanks once a week. I haven't noticed any problems with the Cutwel fluid on my skin although some of the traditional cutting oils do give me dermatitis. Ester-based cutting oil seems to be fine and hydraulic and way oil don't seem to affect me either.
The value of being able to film inside the machine isn't as great as I expected anyway it's kind of boring after the first 20 clips. I might try using my mist lubricator for anything where the machining is really interesting, but removing large quantities of material at high rates in aluminium without the flood coolant is a recipe for disaster, as I found my cost when trying to film an expensive 6 mm cutter throwing rooster tails at high removal rates
What are the dishes for?
Mostly by radio amateurs for terrestrial microwave and millimetre wave experimentation. One specific use is where an Australian amateur adapted A122 gigahertz MM wave radar chip designed for position detection detection in industrial processes over a few 10s of metres, but with a good antenna and a clear path on a cold dry day it's possible to get over 100 kilometres range using voice and some clever digital algorithms. Other uses are for communication via the moon, sending 10s or hundreds of Watts of microwave energy and getting back signals on the other side of the Earth which are very very close to the thermal noise level.
@@MachiningandMicrowavesCommunication via the moon sounds awesome!
There's something thrilling about hearing your own signal coming back off the moon after a few seconds, or off the auroral curtain after ten milliseconds. It never gets old
Why CNC instead of 3D printed metal? Strength requirements are low for antennas which makes printing a good fit, surface finish might be an issue.
Something about a decent metal printer costing a ludicrous amount! Also the lack of precision with sintering compared with machining, at least for now. I'm working on a sponsored vid for a metal 3d fab shop, but it's early days yet.
You should go commercial!! Forget amateur
I do some work for universities, television, and commercial companies but there are some barriers. Because I'm not running a limited company, some organisations are enable to deal with me as a sole trader. I don't hold any certifications for manufacture, so anyone needing ISO 9000 may find it difficult to deal with me. The other aspect is the time not particularly interested in production runs or job shop work with tight deadlines.
I do enjoy the work for college and university department, particularly where the work is for a student project. The thumbnail image on this video is for a piece of commercial work which I can't talk about yet
not sure what you're using for screen recording but it aint workin chief
that was an absolute disaster, but I was in a hurry to get it finished and didn't want to re-record. It turns out that capturing from the second 4k screen on my laptop is extremely slow and I hadn't realised. I've updated the Nvidia driver since then, and it's slightly better, but I'm using the, winkey-G Xbox recorder and that's probably the reason it's terrible. I'd uninstalled the proper screen capture software because I wanted to use the license on another machine and hadn't reinstalled it. Bit of a disaster all round in fact!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves surprised you haven't tried OBS or shadowplay/nvidia share, they both work fine and are free
@@MachiningandMicrowaves no love for obs or shadowplay?
I have OBS, but the other thing, whose name I can't remember, is just so damned convenient, I've carried on using it even though I don't have a subscription to the main software suite any more. Thanks for the tip about Shadowplay, I'll have a look
I mean, cool and all, very shiny, but ...WHY!? Guess I need to sub to find out! :DD
Ultimately, because a lot of other microwave and mmWave radio experimenters are not in the privileged position of not having more important calls on their economic resources. I can make stuff that they imagine and can describe, so they can have extra fun doing their specialist area of experimentation. My lovely Patreon and Ko-Fi supporters fund the materials and carriage costs so I can make cutting-edge parts that can bring a bit of joy and fun into the lives of those experimenters with brilliant ideas but empty wallets.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Hell yeah, that's awesome! As, you see, I myself am a maker with at least mediocre ideas but an empty wallet.
Empty wallets are better than empty heads I guess.
@@MachiningandMicrowaves That's for sure :D
Oh my, this commentary is very on-the-nose for someone using a combination of scripting software and recalcitrant CAD kernels to do their bidding.
How have you convinced your wife about buying a CNC?
Caroline died in 2021, that's what gave me the impetus to start this channel. We were married for 37 years and I can't remember a single time when she told me I couldn't do a project. She never even gave me the old eye-roll and sigh...
I never told her she couldn't do anything either. So many folks I hear from say "I'd love to do but my significant other won't let me". Funny sort of relationship that must be. I have a new partner now, we've known each other for almost 40 years and she's also 100% behind me and my daft ideas and projects and shopping addiction.
That's all very nice but i miss Amy
AIMEE had a temporary break for these two videos. Something about visa restrictions on gaining access to Canada for unembodied virtual snarkbots. When my trip to present the talks in Vancouver was messed up by the airline booking agency, I had to rush flat out to turn the talks into videos in a last-minute flurry of panic. Nailed it, but AIMEE was left on the subs bench for these two fixtures.
My granny is miser
He spent his life time savings on an old robot that I bet still runs Windows 3.1
It's embedded Linux, with gigabit ethernet. And it's brand new!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Oh, well maybe you know something about CNC machines and can help me with the one I bought at the Thrift Store.
My popcorn button is broken, I keep pressing it and only get a rotating table and lights and noise, but no popcorn.
However, the number buttons all mostly work. If I press a 1, I get a 1. If I press a 2, I get a 2... etc.
But there seems to be no plus minus multiply or divide buttons so I'm stumped as to what to do next to begin calculations.
I press Start and then again with the rotating table and lights and noise... but no computating or milling... just my numbers counting down.
I try it with a part on the rotating table, but then I get sparks and sometimes something that appears to be plasma.
@@choppergirl Is it one of those thrift stores that magically appear, full of wondrous and mysterious items and then when you go back a few days later there's no sign of it ever having existed?
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yeah, that's why when I saw a WO-33a vacuum tube oscilliscope for 5 bucks, I grabbed it and rushed to the counter! An osciliscope at that price is never coming poor girl's way ever again! Fortune favors the bold.
You probably didn't need to spend your entire pension brother. Could of went cheaper on the cnc
@@RoboArc Not many options, and of course a lot of the additional costs are in tooling and vane compressors and vices and fluids and dehumidifier and phase converters, plus shipping and installation services so I spent about double the price of the machine overall. Also, I do have two other pensions!
@MachiningandMicrowaves oh ok, as long as you didn't spend all of your money 😌. I love the machine and dream of the day I can afford something like this.
I don't have a full shop yet or anything. Can't really fit that bad boy anywhere. In America we can get older machines for cheap, usually broken down or otw out the door for under 10k.
I built a 3d printed cnc for kicks, but I'll eventually get a professional 5 axis in the near future. Maybe not as nice as yours though 😄 little out of budget.
@@RoboArc I think I need to save up and buy the parts for a DIY wire EDM machine next
@MachiningandMicrowaves I have some plans for one actually 😅 the price gets out from under you though and I'm a poor college student at the moment lolz.
Tip tho, use UHMW for the frame. It's cheap and it's incredibly strong, I use it a lot in my own robotics projects.
Engineering plastics are a fun subject to mess around with. Especially for hobby stuff, you can get a big sheet of uhmw for 150$~250 ish and other stuff is just as cheap.
Might speed up your build since you can actually do high feed rates at a decent DOC with that machine.
As long as you keep your designs simple in shapes as well, then you should be able to speed up project production by a fair amount. . I've taken a few computer aided design courses and simple designs take less time to generate.
I just bought a slab of UHMWPE that's 500x500x45 mm, think it cost £46, which is excellent value for making mmWave lenses at least. I couldn't justify a full sheet, but it's a really nice material. Hadn't thought of it for framing, good tip, thanks
Shiny mmm
@@barryshrives I'm a sucker for a nice surface finish...
0:37 “software” not “softwares”
I have NO idea why I said that. I was thinking of the academic way of describing programs as "codes" I think! Mouth and Brain not in gear!
@@MachiningandMicrowaves great video btw and keep up the great work 👍👍
First!
@@taylorlindley5578 one day, I'm going to remember to pin a comment and be first myself
Dont forget you can also whore out your CNC works to other makers to help offset the cost ;)
Im with you on the casting of aluminum to create shapes in dimensions that would ruin your budget if you had to buy a 6m length, for example . I thought it would be great to recycle the aluminum chips from the lathe. it turns out they were a real mess in the furnace. Sort of burned rather than melted , maybe because of the surface area? Melting some bigger bits so you can drop the chips into the liquid was better. The other thing was chips that had been wet with cutting oil previously also didnt go so well. Now i use old ali engine parts, ali car rims are also good as they have the type stamped inside . Love your work
I did think a bit about using an argon purge chamber with my induction heater and melting compressed pellets of chips made with the hydraulic press, but I'd still have to use some solvent to pre-clean the chips. I think taking them to a recycler with a vacuum furnace might be the only sensible solution for chips and offcuts less than about 6 mm cross-section. I'll probably only get pennies for a dustbinful, but at least it won't go to landfill