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Stealth milling
23:24 10/04/2006 |
| So I need to hide my mill, but also be able to get to it quickly when I want to use it. As I live in the city
and my landlady is probably intolerant of oily swarf-flinging against the far reaches of my carpetted lounge, this stealthing box
also needs to protect the room (and me - endmills always ping in the direction of your eyes!) when the machine is in operation.
So the first thing I did was to model up the mill and the tubular metal stand we'd made for it, so I could look into creating a
wooden shell to go around it. My idea is to make a kind of nice wooden closet. The inside I'll insulate and oil-proof by using layers
of metal and plastic. I intend to have two sets of doors, one behind the other, on the front: the first being wood, and the second being
a safety glass shield. When I was last milling teflon I needed to do some serious removal of stock and employed a facemill.. it
worked beautifully, but it rained teflon snow down over my whole lounge! So these glass doors should keep all of the dust in while
the machine is running. And the wood doors can help us all pretend that we don't have a 200KG milling machine sitting in my lounge.
Except that in creating the 3D drawing of this monster, I realized it's huge! The average closet may be 1.4M (5') long, but it surely isn't
1.1M (4') wide! So looking at it, I think I'll have to remount the Y-axis (the front center protrusion) servo underneath the metal frame, so the motor is pointing
into the mill, rather than out. That cuts of 15cm (1/2'), and I can maybe squeeze a few more inches room from behind the motor
where I was a bit conservative (in not wanting it to scrape..) |
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Lets cut some wood
3:20 PM 1/5/2006 |
| With our plan ready (and some small practical modifications made to it) we're ready to start. Wooden beams are very cheap, but there is a little caveat (we'll talk about it later). A stack of beams cost a pittance, with each beam about 2$. Since we don't want our project to look like our school woodworking project, we won't bother trying to hand-saw it, and go straight with a decent machine. This takes most of the toil and annoyance out of woodworking and makes it rather good fun (not to mention a lot more accurate/straight/rigid)
To start I made the two squares for the front and the back of the closet. It makes sense for these to be done first as the doors will hang off them, so it's important they're rigid and level. While the sides will screw into place the front and rear squares will use nails to hold them together. In order to do this, we mark and drill the side beams (we don't want to try and hammer a nail perpendicularly through the grain!) and then simply nail it into the face adjacent to the length of the beam. This means it actually grips on the grain and is very strong.
Tragedy! Setback! Woe! Wonder why those beams were so cheap? There's a joke about being able to sail around the world if you use wood from [name of large hardware store]... just look how bent these things are! Argh. The lesson for today is, if you're going to buy beams from the HW store, take you time - press them up against the metal frames of the shelves in the store to check straightness, or even lay them on the floor. As a result of my bendy-beams I had to go back and buy a whole bunch more (the rest became cheap firewood), and I was shocked to find about 40% of the beams in my local HW were bent by more than an inch over their length. Buyer beware, indeed! |
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