With metal and plastic you simply can’t just keep taking smaller bites or move slower until it works. You have to take the right sized bit for your build, the biggest one possible.
With wood if you ever get a bit of charring on your cuts…that is horrible because in plastic or metal that is exactly where the bit will break, there is no forgiveness. This happens in things like corners or drilling. If you have slotting, pocketing, drilling and carving dialed in perfectly in wood, no charring and smooth edges you are good.
Plus, on that particular part, the weight of the gantry and the router are holding it down. The bit should be pulling down to (if it’s an upcut bit). Would it really be lifting at all?
I wish there were a standardized way to measure stiffness on these machines where we could compare numbers. Something easy for anyone like drawing the crown.
If it’s shaking itself to death until the bit breaks, then to me that says either too many flutes (not the issue, you have single-flute bits) or low stiffness. But I don’t know how to quantify stiffness.
Yeah. It would be good to able to measure something and say, “That’s not great, but close. Try it out for a while” or “That’s 10 larger than it should be. You should find where that’s coming from”. I just wonder how to do that where it is measuring one thing, and not everything at once.
Fish scale connected to the bottom of the Z axis, then pull parallel to Y and again parallel to Z. Try first with Z all the way down then again with it all the way up. Wouldn’t that be a reasonable metric for center rigidity?
That would only measure how hard you could pull. You could attach a distance measurement, and then use the scale to try to put a set amount of force. But that is still going to be a lot of different variables baked into one. Maybe that is better than nothing.
I tied a string to my LR gantry, and then tied the other end of the string to a bottle of olive oil, and hanged the bottle off the side. So the EVOO was pulling with its weight. And I measured the deflection with a dial indicator. Maybe we could do something similar, but have the collet grab an eye loop and measure right at the bit.something like 0.5L of water would be ok. The costs would be a dial indicator though.
Maybe something like the test pattern generator but with and without a weight (hanging sideways via cable). Maybe with vernier style marks which are probably good for .1 mm easily. Just thinking out loud.
I have cut thicker aluminium reasonably well (4mm), but the thinner stuff seems to be the issue.
I had a whole load of control plates to cut out this week, and it would have been nice to mill them out while I did something else. But I didn’t have the time to spend trying to dial it in.
So, 3 hours of Jigsaw, bandsaw and filing instead.
Maybe one day. Makes a great platform to put your tea & biscuits on however
If that is the case it is just a work holding issue. Sounds like you might need weights or to drill and screw into the waste area. You can run gcode to poke holes in all the right places, pause, screw it down, then run the main code.