I’m making a gate on my CNC mill. There’s a video of the progress here:
There will be 3 sections, the top section is horizontal panels, the second section is wooden poles, and third section is vertical panels.
The CNC has been great for making the joints and the slots to rest the panels.
If I were to start again I’d probably resize the machine to be able to cut a full length plank of wood because having to turn the wood and make sure it all lines up perfectly has been a bit of a pain.
I’ll post photos and video when I’ve made more progress
Haha. That intense music and then the sleeping dog… Hilarious.
And, this is a neat project. Who needs a pantarouter to make mortise and tenons? This is just great. I keep thinking I’d need to stand the board on its end to do joint details, but cutting a cheek at a time is a great idea. I’d love to see some more details walking through the cut setups and joinery, if you’re willing.
Also, that is a nice big bit. Is that 1/2"? What settings are you running that with?
I still think that making mortises and tenons is waaaaayyy faster with the good old wood chisel and hand saw/table saw/router, but it may be more accurate this way.
It may also be easier to just move the gantry by hand axis per axis to do these cuts, instead of making all the gcode instructions and let the machine do the work. That’s probably how I would have done it if I were you.
Heh, fortunately I had the whole gate designed in Fusion360 anyway, so exporting the paths to the CNC was nice and fast. I’m also rubbish with a chisel!!
It’s 8mm flat, so around 1/3rd of an inch. I’ve been running it super slow because I unfortunately chipped the tip of the bit over the weekend and it’s causing a lot of smoke! I’ll post details of my optimal settings once my replacements arrive on Tuesday.
Heh, I caught a leather glove on fire once. I have a propane forge in my barn’s basement, thought the metal was cool, I was wrong! Wasn’t glowing anyway… Glad I was wearing gloves!
That looks like a lot of fun. Designing it, and figuring out how to set up the cuts, going through all the CAM. That must have been pretty exciting to see it finished. If that was made from some fine hard wood, it could be legitimate furniture, like a headboard. Congrats!
That is a great project. I do this type of work on my routing table but this is definitely a creative approach. One thing that came to mind when seeing this is possibly setting up a jig to mount them upright under the cutting head. This would require removing the scrap board and/or creating a hole to do them. I could picture lining up a handful of tenons at once and having them all completed without the need to turn them. That would be interesting to try. Biggest problem would be dealing with the tool depth supporting the depth of the cut. Has to be long enough to not drive the gantry into the piece.
Very impressive work! Congratulations on your final product.
Standing planks on-end would be fantastic. I noticed that the YouTuber Frank Howarth has a similar setup on his CNC table (although, it’s not very tall).
As far as depth of cut goes, I’ve not yet made a cut deeper than 50mm-60mm (2 - 2.3 inches), but I imagine that’d be good enough in most cases.
