I’m just getting my machine finished and I’m about ready to start cutting things. I built it a bit larger than normal because my use case is primarily 2d cutting and drilling. Build area is 48" x 48" and I have a Dewalt 660 for the spindle.
One of the first things I want to work on is a 5mm baltic birch plywood cabinet for E3D BigBox I’m building. Anyone have any tips for me? I haven’t purchased any end mills yet because I’m not quite sure which I should get. Especially for getting the sharp corners where the sides joint together. I found a video of someone CNC cutting a Ultimaker cabinet and it looks like they drilled all the holes first and then screwed the stock into the waste board through those.
That works. You can also leave tabs on the perimeter cut and finish the cuts with a hand saw or other small powered saw. I haven’t looked at the big box files, but did see one a couple months ago. Really nice looking printer! Since you can’t cut a square inside cut, you’ll need to look into putting in some corners. As for the bit selection, either a down cut or up cut will work. Depends on which side of the ply you want to look nice. Up cuts may lift the plywood in the middle, so watch out for that. Down cut bits should never be used to make holes, you can start a fire, think about how fire bows work on those survival shows, same thing will happen. They do make up and down cut bits, but they’re expensive, and I’ve not tried one yet.
So would I cut the 5mm depth in 3 passed? Use a downcut bit on the first cut to keep the top layer of plywood looking nice, then switch to an upcut bit for the other 2 passes to keep the bottom nice too?
Not sure how well that would work. I have a hell of a time making sure nothing moves when swapping out bits. I just assume I’m going to have to sand some edges.
I cut an Ultimaker Original frame from 6mm birch plywood.
Used a 2mm upcut bit and 4 passes, turned out okay after sanding the edges a little bit.
Of course it would have been smarter if I had cut it mirrored with the back side up
For the inside corners i just used a small square file.
