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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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