DMC2: Pocketing Out Some Aluminum

[@GatorGlider]

Looks like yours came together nicely. I'm really on the fence about pulling mine apart and redoing some of the assembly. Yours sounds nice and sturdy. I had some parts that I think are a bit out of spec. I need to use mine in it's current state to re cut the x-axis stepper mount. I'd really like to take all the tubes and fly cut them flat. I spent way too much time than I'd like to admit trying to get all the rails straight and true.

[@amp_mechanic]

Thanks. Ya, I know some people have milled the surfaces and spent a lot of time with a dial indicator making marks all over the place. My initial reaction is, that's complete overkill. But I also realize some kits could have some really warped pieces. I don't know how well Shariff sorts them. And I've bought enough steel to know, some portions are dead straight, others are not. And some of the pieces in my kit were definitely not straight, holes not quite aligned etc. But it's close enough and several opportunities to tweak, drill and shim stuff in the right direction so in the end, it's 95% of the way there and cutting reasonably without going to extremes. Luckily I've had years of experience with a cheap 6040 CNC router that I had to do a bunch of work to but it really helped my understand what to watch out for and how to think about simple solutions. Along with a decade 3d printing, some CNC plasma and fabrication experience. And my expectation was to be able to be able to at least sneak up on reasonably dimension-ed parts in steel. I have no expectation of aerospace type accuracy and finishes on a $6k machine. I can hit 0.05mm accuracy fairly easily and can do better with a couple extra spring passes. I can take the time, I'm not doing production work. Anyway, hope that give you some encouragement one way or another. Experiment and give it some time before you jump to a full breakdown and reassembly...unless you really want to.

[@sto2779]

what kind of tolerance and repeatability are you getting?

[@amp_mechanic]

I've cut a few parts now and I'd say it's definitely in the 0.02-0.01mm range. Of course that can depend a lot on your programming. And there's no problem sneaking up on a critical dimension if need be. I just cut some custom coins with some really fine details and having to run certain passes with the v bit a couple times because of not having my normal preferred bit and needing to clean up the cut. I can't see anywhere where it overcut in x or y. On any other machine I've used, there's always a spot or two. So if you pay attention to your axis load, the DMC2 performs very very consistent cuts.

[@sto2779]

@@amp_mechanic thanks for the reply.