{"id":1055,"date":"2011-08-23T11:04:44","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T17:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haveblue.org\/?p=1055"},"modified":"2011-08-23T11:04:44","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T17:04:44","slug":"quick-cnc-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/?p=1055","title":{"rendered":"Quick CNC work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI’m always impressed by Frankie’s<\/a> ability to machine one-off parts on his Taig with minimal time spent on generating the toolpaths, which is something that I want to become better at. I’ll frequently over-think and puzzle over the CAM side so much that I wind up just bashing out parts manually on the Tree. However, for a recent project I needed to do a lot of cutting in odd shapes that would be crazy to do manually for a single part, so I gritted my teeth and dove in.<\/p>\n

As part of my growing RC aircraft addiction, I had purchased an Ikarus SU27-XXL<\/a> kit as a fun ‘zoomy’ plane to advance beyond my trusty Slow Stick<\/a>. My original plan was to use the brushed motor included with the kit – why discard a perfectly good motor, even though it may not be as powerful and efficient as a brushless one?\u00a0 Well, a good reason is that brushed ESCs (electronic speed controller) are much more difficult\u00a0to find these days than their brushless counterparts.\u00a0 So I went brushless anyhow and purchased a motor<\/a> and ESC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since the new 400 brushless was mounted at the base rather than the face, I couldn’t use the included light plywood motor mount.\u00a0 I needed to build my own custom motor mount, and I happened to have some 3″x3″ squares of 1\/16″ G-10 fiberglass sheet<\/a> left over from a project that would make for very sturdy construction.\u00a0 I drew up the needed parts in Cadkey and then tinkered with GibbsCAM at work to hopefully output usable toolpaths.\u00a0 Fortunately, I’ve gotten much better in this regard, and the G-code worked out just fine.<\/p>\n

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I used a hunk of scrap polycarbonate bolted to the tooling plate on my Taig as a sacrificial base.\u00a0 Frankie recommended using carpet tape to hold sheet stock flat for machining, and it worked like a charm.\u00a0 I’m using a 1\/32″ carbide cutter to do the milling – I think it cut through the sheet in 3 or 4 passes.\u00a0 When done, the parts were easily pulled off of the base.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After removing the tape and adhesive with a ‘Goo Gone’ type of solvent, here’s the parts I had.\u00a0 As it turned out, I could have skeletonized them far more than I did, and using 1\/32″ G-10 may have been an even better material.\u00a0 I did have to do a bit of filing by hand to make things fit – the original plywood parts were laser cut and so had perfect square cornered slots, which obviously can’t be done with a round endmill.<\/p>\n

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Glued together, it looks pretty good!<\/p>\n

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Fits beautifully on the plane and certainly looks like the beefiest part of the entire airframe.<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, she would never look this good again…\u00a0 On the final flight (just after I had moved up to a larger prop that finally provided the performance I wanted), I pulled out of a fast low level loop right into a tree, and the brittle Depron foam snapped all over.\u00a0 The motor and mount tore free from the plane and was unscathed, however, so I’ll be dropping the unit into a scratchbuilt MiG-29 made out of pink sheet foam from the home improvement store.\u00a0 I have a feeling that the motor mount will easily outlast that airframe as well…\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m always impressed by Frankie’s ability to machine one-off parts on his Taig with minimal time spent on generating the toolpaths, which is something that I want to become better at. I’ll frequently over-think and puzzle over the CAM side so much that I wind up just bashing out parts manually on the Tree. However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cnc-metalworking-2","category-rc-aircraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}