did some cutting, made a useful thing but not what i intended.
First thing i tried to make was an enclosure for my new hestia pi opensource thermostat. (annoyingly i have a boiler in the uk that has two wires with control a single heater where as the hestia pi is design to use a single wire and the live feeding the boiler so i have to do some more hackery to get it to work with the hestia pi)
ANYWAY. i had my Mckeller router cutting at full 230v and it cut fine into some pretty hard wood but my god it is noisy. i am about 10 metres from the house in a concrete building with a tin roof and i can hear it from within the house through the double glazing. Anyway I had abort the full cut due to time and lateness of night out of an abundance of compassion for my neighbours. Also it would have been keeping our 4 and 2 year old up.
The mckeller at full Volts give a no load speed of 31000rpm which was more than capable of cutting the wood at the speeds set out in ryans estlcam tutorial.
In the end with the hestia pi i 3d printed the case as it has vents on the side which presumably increase the longevity of the raspberry pi zero within.
The useful print i did was for a spacer which was to mount my guitar back the the wall. Its hanger bracket had fallen out due to use of tiny wall plugs which were barely screwed into the plaster.
I used fusion 360 to make the sketch dxf and then estlcam to make the gcode mostly using the automatic cut and holding tab options but double checking and ensuring that the depth of cut was deeper than my wood. I elevated the wood using a couple of similar thickness offcuts and clamped at the edges under the belts.
I ran the router using an SCR (dimmer switch) to drop the voltage and hence the speed so that i couldnt hear it in the house and then performed the cut. It did the three 120 degree screw holes perfectly but when it came to cut the 80mm diameter outer cut it lost steps and what started as a circle quickly became and ellipse due to my reduction of cutting speed to far with no complementary reduction of feed. My guess is that as it cut across the grain it lost more step which is why i didn’t just get a spiral.
It is becoming clear to me i need to find the sweet spot for pinewood feeds and speeds and i need a more sound damping enclosure.
So anyway what was my useful object. well i took that damaged spacer, cut it out on my bandsaw and used it a drilling template which protected my plaster work which id repaired recently and ensured the holes into the wall were orthogonal.
Pretty sure this is a useful machine already but its going to take a bit more work before i can use it for long periods.
the nagware of estlcam (stick) and the bloody usefulness of it (carrot) has got me looking at my deep pockets for the 49 euros (whatever that is in GBP)
big thanks to everyone so far who’ve helped me.