I Spent my ENTIRE Pension on a CNC Machine!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

This vid was a talk I presented remotely to the Microwave Update conference in Vancouver. I've probably used abbreviations and jargon that are aimed at an informed bunch of techie microwave radio nerds. I'll be making dedicated videos about the design and manufacturing process, but if there's any extreme jargon or acronyms/initialisms, please feel free to drop a comment with a timestamp and I'll try to shed some light on what on earth I was banging on about.

[@Basement_CNC]

Happy to see a X5 out there, just because I want to buy one too 😂

[@2oqp577]

Don't worry Neal, there are a bunch of us that did not notice any of those abbreviations as they are in our daily alphabet soups. My friend and I have built each our laboratories, while going up only to a few Ghz, with HP/Agilent, Tek and I suspect some R&S soon, to experiment to our heart's content. I imagine we are not alone in your viewer bunch. Now did you throw in your AI assistant for that CNC setup? We haven't heard of her? Anywho, I wonder how much of an RF lab you have, if any...

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@2oqp577 I have a basic setup, with an HP specan that goes to 26.5 GHz, plus external mixers to get me to 50 GHz, an Agilnet E4406A, a few E4433 sig gens, 20 GHz counter, lots of power meters and heads up to 70 GHz, a Fluke 8845A 6.5 digit DVM, several AC millivoltmeters, a range of slotted line, sliding shorts, sliding loads, directional couplers, the usual LiteVNA/PocketVNA and a few other cheap VNAs, calibrated SOLTs to 50 GHz, some old HP VNAs (pre-8510), plus heaps of cavity wavemeters, rotary vane attenuators to 76 GHz, vacuum pumps and associated bits, 15 kV variable DC supplies and all the detritus from 50+ years of hoarding. Also a few frequency standards, Rubidium, well-aged and thermally/physically isolated quartz, backed by a couple of GPSDOs with decent antennas. I only have three 42U racks in my study, and there are still a few spaces in there. Having been close to a few Keysight PNAs in labs I've visited, I'd really like a decent modern VNA that can go beyond 24 GHz, but that needs significant funds. Unless Keysight want to lend me one and some range extenders and standards?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@2oqp577 I wasn't sure that the esteemed audience at Microwave Update was quite ready for AIMEE. I am sure the snarkmeister will return as normal service is resumed

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

It certainly felt a bit of a risk, but since Titan got involved, and they got more national sites, it feels a lot safer choice. I miss through-spindle coolant and a wash-down hose, and should have gone with a proper Renishaw-style probe and a 4th axis drive, but my funds were limited.

[@H3adcrash]

This channel is basically Technology Connections, but RF, in the UK. Brilliant.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Alec has MUCH better hair than me. I already had a Kallax unit and stole the background idea from Rob at VidIQ before I'd seen Alec's channel. Alec's lighting is also WAAAAY better than my cheap LED strings pinned to the rear and illuminating a curtain made from bed sheets.

[@BunkerSquirrel]

say no more. I'm subbing

[@H3adcrash]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves His hair is spectacular indeed! But you have the ability to make a really impressive wig from alu chips instead!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@H3adcrash Carbon nanotubes. Mmmmmmm

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@BunkerSquirrel Thanks!

[@PaulGrayUK]

Wonderful to see somebody niche a hobby so intense and getting all the choice wish list tools ticked off. Living the dream Sir, living it real

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have three 42U racks of electronic testgear, and more on the way, but I'd love a surface grinder and a CNC-converted lathe. The vacuum PVD and sputtering gear is almost ready to roll, and the electrochemistry bench is fully equipped. I even have all the necessary regulatory stuff in place to buy concentrated acids and other controlled chemicals. Had to install a special cabinet for those. It's very yellow.

[@LiyangHU]

​@@MachiningandMicrowaveswhen I grow up I wanna be just like you. 😂

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@LiyangHU Yikes!

[@proluxelectronics7419]

CNC was a no-brainer, less stress, easy workflow. Hell, when you're gone, the government won't want a CNC machine..🤣🤣

[@asteriondaedalus6859]

It's only "money", your grandkids were thinking "inheretance", LOL.

[@LionelAkram]

I know I would, heh.

[@eatplastic9133]

I would prefer to inherit a CNC machine :D

[@WHJeffB]

Yeah well... If he's not careful, 15-20yrs down the line cat food might be in his diet and he might wish he had saved that payout for the future, LOL!

[@Thorker]

Or maybe he can get one of them to have an interest for CNC and can learn to be machinists. Build a company while having them under your wing and teach them the ways. Then leave it for them as an inheritance for them to manage and keep building. Give them pride in their work as machinists and they will excel beyond most people's competency and capabilities.

[@classydays43]

Man how different the world is. I'm in the middle of deep drawing some sheet steel from a veggie oil drum as part of a dial pan for an old clock I'm building by hammering out the sheet on hand made dies and here you are, twice my senior, whipping out some of the latest in manufacturing advancements. You're a complete madlad and not a cent was wasted on that CNC machine!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I'm also a woodworker and do a bit of blacksmithing and sheet metalwork and steel fabrication, but nothing good enough for public consumption. I just love the whole "making things from ideas in my head" process. I was taught how to use hammers to move metal around when I was 17, and that muscle-memory is still there. I come from a long line of agricultural workers, ditch-diggers and carters, where having a wide range of obscure skills was seen as something natural and vital. I'm a half-decent dressmaker, I can knit, and I'm a good commercial quality willow basketmaker, Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers of the City of London, no less! Sadly, I wasted my entire life doing horribly technical things with computers, comms, data networking and cybersecurity in the pursuit of funds to buy toys. I could've been a contender.... kzbin.info/www/bejne/m5erq3quet93h6M

[@classydays43]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves damn, you're even multi-talented! I've always wanted to try basket weaving, if at the very least to put all the invasive vines to use. Don't sell yourself short on what you put time in. If it gave you joy then it was worth it. If not, at least it paid for other things. Computing and electrical componentry has never been my strong suit so I applaud anyone with the talent to even apply those for career purposes. In my case, I grew up poor and mum was very disheartened at how many things were not working correctly in her life, so in my spare time I learned ho to fix things by reading books at the library about wood and metal working and that sort of spiralled in to life skills I've since applied in several jobs over the years. It turns out a lot cheaper to fix things when you have the tools to fix them and raw materials are so abundant people just throw them out if they're not the right shape. I absolutely love the idea of putting skills to more community efforts so I occasionally volunteer at a repair shop that mostly deals with consumer stuff. Although just like you, I also love the process of putting pencil to paper and turning those hasty scribbles in to something useable and practical, or even just working with a half-baked idea and having the hands to bring it to the real world like wood carving or engraving.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@classydays43 I was homeless for a while around 1982. I was sleeping in the directors' boardroom of an abandoned oil, coal and salt warehouse on a disused dock in Hull. That taught me some very useful lessons about surviving and even thriving. My mum describes her life when I was young as being "poor as a church mouse", and I had to learn a lot of make-do-and-mend skills that most folks wouldn't need to pick up. I was definitely in the "posh" tier of homeless, I wasn't sleeping in doorways, and the warehouse was safe and dry. I made a little money using my furniture-making skills to produce fake antique pine furniture in a workshop in the Fish Meal factory. The lads in the fabrication shop there let me use their huge metalworking machines in return for biscuits and cakes. I picked up a lot of skills during that time, and I'd completed most of the useful parts of a four-year electronic engineering degree, and the rest is history. I lost interest in electronics for work and went back into computer stuff just in time for the boom in business computing. I knew a lot of esoteric stuff that others didn't, and that paid what felt like serious money!

[@MikeBucceroni]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves wow what a story! Amazing how far a little kindness from the men in that shop has stretched. They could easily write a movie about that

[@KallePihlajasaari]

If you have plans to do this in the future then have a look at the hydro forming people. Making a smooth dome is just the thing. You just need a machined base and collar and a pressure washer or hydraulic pump for thicker material. There are a couple of DIY examples done with simple welded bladders as well here on yt.

[@animus3d663]

Huge win for syil community. Welcome brother

[@thybaltcarratala2433]

this man is crazy, love from france

[@synco1985]

oh man, so nice to have you back

[@theradiorover]

I remember saying a couple of years back, "why don't you get a CNC machine Neil?" Glad you took my advice 😊. Anyway, well done. That ticks many boxes. Money - can't take it with you. ✅️ He with most toys wins ✅️ Massive increase in your Al chip collection ✅️ More time for sleep (I know you don't) while your toys beaver away making you stuff. ✅️ Phenomenal purchase and video Neil. Looking forward to seeing more!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@theradiorover I remember it well, so it's all your fault!

[@simoncleret]

I'm so happy more and more people are learning CAD/CAM

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

My first exposure was in 1983, but apart from a bit of 3D printing, I've never used any CAM systems. After a month, I was able to write my own postprocessor for Fusion to drive the SYIL mill as a vertical lathe. I've been coding since the early 1970s so that wasn't very hard.

[@simoncleret]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yeah, the hard part is going to be learning all the "best practices" for machining and figuring out exactly what speeds/feeds your tools like for the materials you're cutting. Strongly recommend getting the aluminum-specific cutters. They will save you a lot of frustration from chips welding themselves to the bit, completely ruining your surface finish.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@simoncleret I'm using mostly YG-1 and Korloy A+ lapped carbide end mills and high-rake lapped inserts, and DLC coated threadmills, plus some chip-splitting semi-roughers. Coolant is full-synthetic. I'm using some cobalt-HSS tools for plastics. Also using some worm-pattern drills for aluminium and some special brass drills.

[@neojohn9335]

as an engineer im not, if your a dentist you dont want people to be cavity free.

[@simoncleret]

​@@neojohn9335 I like seeing cool stuff being built more than I'm afraid of losing work.

[@flantc]

I have been doing some phased array Ku-band radar work recently. I am used to software that can cost $10,000. I got a quote from Ansys for their HFSS suite. I nearly passed out when they told me $100,000 plus support costs. Sometimes real world testing is cheaper. Even if it is tens of thousands of dollars.

[@MCsCreations]

Wow... Congratulations, man! Really stunning new toy... I mean... tool! 😃 Looking forward to see what you make next! Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

[@JamesDriver40]

Undermentioned advantages of CAD in my opinion - it scales between component and system level information; and the reduction in the cost of revision. I used to work in oil and gas infrastructure design. Database driven CAD was getting to the point where mechanical 3D design was being completed/ updated in relation to the process design so it was harder to make mistakes. I had to stop sketching even simple piping drawings by hand. It always seems like it’ll be fine, and then you get more information - 15 min to make one update in a computer file vs. a couple hours to redo a hand sketch.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@JamesDriver40 Generating designs directly from mathematical representations was the main driver for me. Making an asymmetric secant-squared dielectric body or an axially-displaced ellipse body of rotation directly from algebraic equations adds immensely to my creative process.

[@silverXnoise]

Resale value is probably less durable than your house, but a damn sight better than a car. Have fun!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I kinda hope that it will outlast me, but now I want a CNC lathe and a 4th/5th axis and a coolant-driven spindle speeder and.....

[@dsfs17987]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves don't fall into that trap, 4th is great to have, but 5th is waste of money for this sort of thing, not to mention that 5axis cam cost, that is extra $$$ in Fusion, along with 4th, and work envelope will decrease drastically with the addon 5th solutions in a machine that wasn't designed as 5x in the first place unless you _really_ need that, it is better to design parts that don't need that complexity and added investment

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@dsfs17987 Sound advice, I'll wait until I win the lottery before considering anything beyond a decent 4th axis drive

[@ScuffedEngineer]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Honestly, I think a lot of lathe work is easily done with a manual. Unless you want to do stuff with a lot of curves/splines that need to be on size or need to make a lot of parts (over 10 for hobby use). A tool post grinder and spindle will get you most of the way with a manual lathe. To clarify when I say easier, by the time you're done using CAM or manually writing your g-code, you could've finished setting up tools or halfway done with the project.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@ It's the elliptic/parabolic/hyperbolic surfaces and things like cutting 80 grooves of varying depth along a curved surface that are my motivations to get a CNC lathe.

[@AckzaTV]

I think its wonderful to see a man able to live the dream of owning his own metal factory in home. I got a $160 vevor cnc but havent assembled it yet. But im happy you have a big one to really take 3d printer busy-ness to a whole new level.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have one of those that a friend gave me. It would be great fun to try to get it working one day.

[@jimurrata6785]

I'd love to see you do a collab w/ Huygens Optics.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Now THERE's a channel I totally adore! The project for television has eaten every spare moment for several months, now I need to build my views back up so I can get back into a good publishing cadence and think about some collabs. I'm working on one right now, but it's part of Project Narwhal, so I can't talk about the details until the TV broadcast happens. I have two other collabs in the pipeline as well.

[@jimurrata6785]

​@@MachiningandMicrowavesI'll be waiting with baited breath! I was intrigued when you mentioned the similarities to optics, and thought immediately of* the software he shows on his channel. When you showed your roughing cut (fixture failure) I'd thought you were making a Fresnel lens.... My father worked in optics, radar and radio. I was always intrigued with synthetic aperture and other beam forming techniques.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@jimurrata6785 Phased arrays and particularly mechanically-operated reflectarrays are on the agenda for next year, along with metamaterials and frequency-selective surfaces.

[@jimurrata6785]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Repurposing a microlens array or starting from scratch? (I'm a scrounger 😄) Intrigued. So glad I found your channel.

[@rolux4853]

Congratulations on that amazing machine! I’m a trained german precision mechanic and I miss having access to CNC machines! A few years into my precision mechanic job I became a CAD/CAM engineer and designed everything I built myself, that was incredible fun. These days I advanced to a project lead position and have no more access to any machines. For one this is great since I more than doubled my pay and I can work from home, but on the other hand I really miss having access to manufacturing facilities. Back then I could build whatever I wanted, my boss didn’t care. I could use all the material from the trash bin (the thrash bin had amazing stuff in it, basically every kind of material and size as long as it was shorter than 300mm got thrown away) and use all the tools I wanted. Nowadays I wish I would have a CNC machine in my shed.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I never imagined that one day I'd have a shiny new CNC machine in my tiny machine shop. I thought about doing a conversion of a 25 year old industrial machine, but fitting it into the available space seemed impossible, and then there's the unknown state of the ballscrews and ways. That's a "This Old Tony" sort of challenge. I just didn't have the time or energy to do a serious conversion. Now I can't imagine being without a CNC mill or my Bambu X1C. I might do a conversion/refurb of a CNC lathe one day, but I don't have space for one unless I get rid of the Colchester lathe or do some serious reconstruction of the ancient barn to make a new work area

[@AndrewAHayes]

I worked for an engineering/toolmaker company before retiring and used to spend my lunchtimes down in the workshops learning CAD and designing and making parts for my motorcycle, I no longer have motorcycles but I do have 3D printers and a homemade MPCNC that I use to carve wooden electric guitar bodies and necks, I have a manual mill for making the hardware for the guitars but would love to convert it to CNC. You should get yourself a CNC for your shed, its always a good thing to keep up with what you learned earlier in life, and so much fun also!

[@WHJeffB]

Worked 27yrs for a German industrial laser manufacturer and took complete advantage of having a CNC metal cutting laser for hobby and home projects. Retired July 1st of this year and less than a month after retirement, I had three projects that I really could have used that access for!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@WHJeffB I need to find a reliable local laser shop. For now I use a plasma cutter and power nibbler, then machine the features in the mill, but an industrial CNC laser would be very useful here

[@rolux4853]

@ It always like this, isn’t it? At the moment I also have a project where I could use that trusty old Trumpf Laser to build myself an adjustable console for a racing seat. With the Laser and a proper welding machine it would be finished in 4 hours, including the drawing. Now with regular electric handtools it will take at least a week. Oh and congratulations to your retirement!

[@H3adcrash]

It's funny how electricals signals just go from meandering about in cables, to screaming viloently down a pipe.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I love how they get squished longitudinally to give the appearance of superluminal velocities, except that's just the phase velocity. Still screaming especially violently of course

[@alexmayer8877]

You could look into monocrostaline dimond tooling for mirror finishes on your dishes straight out of the mill. Don't get me wrong, I never used these (lack of an industrial cnc milling machine for starters), but heard some good things about them.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I've considered cubic boron nitride and PCD inserts for mirror-finish turning, but not for the mill. The costs are ludicrous of course. It might be worthwhile for experiments on 30 THz (10 micrometres) far-infrared that a number of experimenters in the UK are working on. I don't know if the 1 micrometre steps on the axes and spindle of the SYIL are small enough to make it worth going for diamond/CBN tooling. A real high-end machine has steps down below 100 nanometres, so there are no visible cusps. I think I need to work up to that sort of level of perfection very gently. Could be very interesting for vacuum deposition on to aluminium and copper machined surfaces

[@hardwareful]

Oh what's that you say, production run capability unlocked? What a marvelous addition to the shop!

[@robertsternlieb5532]

Thrilled for you. I look forward to seeing what you can create.

[@chrisblight6069]

I didn't understand half of what you said here but as a machinist I did enjoy the CNC side of things. CNC mills are very expensive (as are all of the CNC range, second-hand or not) but wonderful machines, and I'm not surprised you are enjoying using one. Not familiar with Syril as a brand, but there are a lof of new brands around these days.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I first became aware of the previous generation of SYIL machines when they sent one to Naomi Wu, but then I saw there was a UK agent and the dimensions of the all-new X5 were just enough to get one into my machine shop with 13 mm to spare between the floor and the 8x8 inch oak beam above the door. None of the other low-cost (!) machines would fit, and the barn was thrown together with no foundations, terrible bricks and sandy mortar, plus it was cracked by the earthquake we had near Market Rasen some years ago. I like the way the SYIL is "Assembled in China" from parts that are from many countries. It feels like I could carry out repairs even if the supplier ceased trading. They made a commitment to maintain supplies of spare parts for all their machines long-term, and I thought that was a good sign. It's reasonably fast, reasonably accurate, reasonably powerful and reasonably priced. Yeah, I'd like a Heimle or something, but that would need a lottery win

[@chrisblight6069]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I'll have to check out the Syil range, they sound reasonable. Haas do some decent small CNC mills but still not cheap by any means. Heimle? Yeah, definitely lottery win territory. 😁

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I couldn't fit a Haas through the doorway, it would have needed me to remove that lovely oak beam that I installed 30 years ago. The long-term costs of a Haas were a bit of a problem unless I was going to get a guaranteed level of income from job-shop work or one of the online brokerages like Xometry or Protolabs. I don't want to take on any long-term contractual support costs. I like that I can write macro code for the machine, although I'd like to have more access to APIs so I can write utilities that access the machine over ethernet. Probably safer if I don't fiddle though, and treat this as a black box that just works.

[@alo1236546]

Design sent to gods n magically it sends back to u

[@Ardren]

Wow, that's a serious CNC machine for a home shop. Exceptional choice!

[@AndrewAHayes]

I was thinking the same thing!

[@zebo-the-fat]

Ohhhhhh shiny new toys! (happily spending the kids inheritance?) I understood most of the words in your descriptions, but some of the sentences threw me! Keep up the good work!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Now that Project Narwhal (see the thumbnail for one of the components of that madcap scheme) is almost put to bed, I can get on with proper actual "making stuff" projects again. Being on the TV is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't pay well and the time investment is immense

[@blakOrkk]

I've always wondered how much the surface smoothness affects microwave emmitors and such, I know it's all electromagnetic radiaton like light is but is it as sensitive to roughness? 🤔

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

1/20 of a wavelength is just about good enough, similar to high quality optics. Even 1/10th wavelength works OK. Scattering from surface roughness is a definite problem as you get to wavelengths of a millimetre

[@Simon_Rafferty]

I'm sure it has already occurred to you but I've had a lot of success 3D Printing fixtures for machining. The combination saves a whole heap of time, cost & thinking! I'd be interested in more of a review of your Mill. I looked at Syil a few years ago - but didn't trust the reviews at the time. I ended up buying a used Bridgeport Interact. However, I'd still like something smaller & more modern.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

The older SYILs were not brilliant, but these are made from decent parts from many countries, and the massive epoxy-granite frame makes a big difference. I'm using the Bambu X1C to make fixtures for the CNC already, see at 10:02 although I'm mainly making softjaws from aluminium, steel and Delrin. I'll certainly be using a lot more 3D printed parts for fixturing. As you say, it's a great shortcut and reducer of brain strain

[@qwertyface]

I'd love to hear more about what you do with your parts once you've made them. What does the hobby entail? Is it Ham radio but at higher frequencies? Do you observe satellites?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@qwertyface there are people who use satellites and of course there are quite a lot of amateur radio satellites. There is a Geo stationary satellite called QO100 with a transponder using an uplink at 2.4 GHz and a downlink at 10 GHz. I prefer to think of satellites as passive reflectors, so I bounce signals off the solar panels of the international space station and low Earth orbit satellites as well as aircraft. A lot of the transmission modes are designed to work right at the limits of what is possible using digital modulation. There's also quite a lot of digital television work being done and the satellite also support that. I also make parts for radio telescopes and particularly the people who like to monitor the satellites in the deep space network around 8.4 GHz. I'm also working on imaging radar systems. I been messing about with radio since I was nine years old back in the 1960s and it's kept me completely fascinated for all that time. But then Professor Hannah Fry has it exactly right. in her words, I am the biggest nerd she's ever met.

[@crashn]

Cheers mate! I bit the apple several years back. X7. Have fun!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Good choice! Sadly the bigger models wouldn't fit through the oak-framed doorway into my barn

[@AndrewAHayes]

I built a MPCNC for milling wood and plastic but would love to convert my manual milling machine to CNC, I have a Bambu X1C and AMS and some larger 3D printers but sometimes my parts need to be aluminium. I learned technical drawing at school and still have a table and a set of Rotaring pens and sometimes sketch out designs on paper before drawing them properly on the table and then trying to convert that to Fusion 360, I m starting to learn to think in terms of CAD though.

[@JulianMakes]

Fantastic to see your new machine!

[@chuckcrizer]

I like the way you play.

[@everybot-it]

You sir, are going places, and are in and of itself (yourself?) a great counter to aging anxiety, for the younger folks.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I'll be SIXTY-SEVEN next birthday. I remember thinking 27 was Officially Old. Don't feel any different now from how I felt half a century ago, other than nowadays I'm a little less confused about how the world works and my head is now *almost* completely full of equations and formulae.

[@NiklasAndersson7]

Interesting stuff! Also, remember the saying "If you can't make it precise - make it adjustable". When I did the military service as a technician on some very old, but secret, radar stuff I was amazed by how hands-on it was. In one occasion the wave guide was split in two, and one of the exits was turned 90 degrees. Why? Becase the system needed a 90 degrees reference signal, so the solution was just to split the wave guide, and fysically turn it. Amazing. And another detail was a physical screw we could turn to fix issues with standing wave. The wave-length was about 2-5cm, can't remember correctly and the frequencies are classified anyways, but we should use a screw driver and physically adjust the terminator to get max performance. Perhaps something you can have in mind.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

See also: Use of a ball-pein hammer to create dents in *just* the right place in a waveguide to get the match right. Use of a magnet to move a steel bearing ball around inside a waveguide to find the sweet spot where you should insert a tuning screw. Things have moved on a little, but those techniques are still valid where there are uncontrolled variances. Marvellous

[@dfgaJK]

Did you factor that stress based life expectancy reduction, from the time spend hovering over the start cycle button, into the overall part cost 😆

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I tend to sit staring into the abyss with one finger on the cycle stop button and another on emergency stop. The 12mm x 8mm slot milled into the moving hardened prismatic jaw of that Gerardi vice is a testament to how enthusiastic the machine can be.

[@dfgaJK]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves yeah, not watching too closely is the only real way to cope 😄. I find most of the time the first failure alert is an audible change. A small jaw tickle is a good outcome... at least in contrast to the alternative of bending machine parts!

[@theGeniustechDHRUVGOEL]

"months of your life slip away..." This hits different when you realise it

[@drewlynford256]

You are a badass! I was gonna say try 3d printing to prototype some parts. Then your 3D printer comes on in the video. The work you are producing looks awesome. Being able to iterate through design elements that quickly, without outsourcing to machine shops, is a game changer.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@drewlynford256 I'm negotiating for a MOPA galvo fibre laser, but I don't think I'll be able to get one that can cut reasonable sicknesses of aluminium, brass, copper and stainless. The offers are usually for non-water-cooled 60/100 W galvos, so they can do a certain amount of photodissociation etching as well as simple oxide film growth, but they still feel a bit of a gimmick. Great for people who make engrave trinkets and art but much to coarse and weak for serious use. Wire EDM is another obvious useful technology and I've been looking at matrix electrochemical deposition as another option for 3-D additive micro machining. Certainly being able to write code which generates programmatic output to feed a reasonably heavy-duty CNC mill has opened up a whole lot of new possibilities

[@TheBrick2]

Excellent. I hope it works out for you. Awesome attitude. I have no idea what you are doing despite doing many modules on waves back in my undergrad days but looks like something I could enjoy working on.

[@TheBrick2]

P.S. Very interesting how you a have started to thing in CAD. My background is applied maths and then software and I have found learning CAD a real struggle. Figuring out the interface, long waffling documentation etc. I have been surprised at how frustrating it has been.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@TheBrick2 It took a while before the workflow in Fusion finally clicked for me, but I've used mainframes and minis and dozens of microcontrollers, Linux, Solaris and loads of weird interfaces written using Qt and other frameworks that are not very Windoze-centric, so I didn't have much to unlearn before I could accept the way Fusion does things. Same with Blender and DaVinci Resolve Studio. I made a conscious decision not to make this an Education channel, there are folks who do that's so much better than I could. A lot of what I'm doing is 1950s and 60s technology but it still works perfectly fine and it's a lot more interesting than the microelectronics tech that is currently used in the majority of commercial systems. The problem with that is that it's all about monolithic chip design, integrated antennas and massive phased arrays. all very nice but not very interesting. I need to get onto a regular weekly cadence for publishing videos, but I've got too much going on elsewhere in my life right now to allow me the luxury of enough spare time to do a video once per week. I don't want to do videos just for the sake of it, nor do I want to do a lot of sponsored videos, despite the many offers I'm getting. One day I might get to understand why somebody videos make hundreds of thousands of views and others struggle to make 10,000. The amount of revenue I get from KZbin is tiny compared with creators in other niche areas. Those folks who do real estate, cosmetics and fashion, make at least five times as much per view as I do, so there's no great incentive to chase views. The key purpose of the channel is to get business making and testing prototypes and selling small runs of specialist devices.

[@markmalonson7531]

Enlightening chronology thank you.

[@improviseddiy]

Congrats on the new machine! Now I am really jealous.

[@ARBB1]

Brilliant bastard, hah! All good luck to your endeavors

[@aridstyle]

CNC machining is both challenging and satisfying, I am confident with this machine you will slow atrophy of you brain and live a longer happier life “making things”

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I really need a 4th/5th axis and a Renishaw-style probe, but that is all really serious money and I'd have to do a lot of production work to help pay for the upgrades, plus the additional Fusion licence upgrades. Not keen on the idea of turning into a production job-shop

[@JuanCristobalZagal]

Super interesting work. I love the mixture of electronics with machining which is difficult to find in videos,..

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Heh heh, I could throw in a bit of Verilog and tensor calculus and heat-flow analysis too, plus a bit of C++ coding and microcontrollers (PIC and NUCLEO mostly), but I have about 40 videos in the pipeline already. I'll try to be interesting, that's the best I can do! Oh, and electrochemistry and plating and casting and 3D and lasers and.....

[@grendel1960a]

I picked up some aluminium toolplate discs that were offcuts from a company that made roulette tables, basically these were the holes left over from machining the tables, they were in 1 1/4" aluminium toolplate and perfect for making a 12" pulley, so it may be worth looking around your area for companies that make stuff and have waste- while I was collecting, I noticed their scrap bins alo had 24" aluminium discs, I actually found them by searching for aluminium discs on ebay (i am in Kent UK and the company I found was in Chartham)

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I do have an arrangement with a local fabrication company, but there isn't a lot of metal industry other than sheet metal fabrication in this area. The local agricultural merchant has a small workshop in day sometime let me have bits of metal that came off tractors and harvesters.

[@stuartgray5877]

I am eager to see what 3D metal printing can do to Telecom. I suspect that an entire Spacecraft Telecom system (filters, diplexers, waveguides, switches, etc.) can all be 3D printed into a single unit that you just drop the electronics into. Maybe even a TWTA could be fully 3D printed?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@stuartgray5877 i'm trying to think of a project where a 3-D printed mechanism would make possible some sort of functionality that can't be achieved by conventional machining. The huge problem is always the same with any 3-D printing system and that's getting internal voids with no layer artifacts and surface roughness of a few micrometres RMS to avoid scattering and grating effects. several of the fab shops which do metal 3-D printing have asked me to do sponsored videos, but without an engineering application that makes sense, it's hard to develop a project which isn't just "look at this thing that we can make that's almost as good as we could if we used traditional machining." I'm not very keen on that idea so I'm really looking for suggestions from the community about what type of RF structures could be printed using common metal sintering processes that could not be done on a lathe, or that will outperform parts made in that way. The beautiful bronze centred handle that Tom Lipton had made for his sensitive tail stock drill chuck was the first example I saw where a metal 3-D process produced a result that was potentially cheaper and better than a machined version. In that case, I think it would've required a five access mill to get the organic shape, but for the 3-D process it was trivial to achieve that. If the machine used a vacuum sintering process that worked with copper particles, and the affective surface resistance was similar to that of machined copper, and shrinkage was well defined and controlled, then it might be possible to print some wave guide combiner components. It would be very difficult to beat investment casting though. Those traditional techniques have a 50 year plus head start on additive processing, so it will take some time to displace them. I would like to try 3-D electroforming, which would produce entirely solid copper forms in a similar manner to those that are 3-D printed, except it would be far too time-consuming to use single electrodes. I've seen an example using a matrix array of electroforming elements which then copper onto a substrate using that 2-D array of electrodes. printing ceramic 3-D form seems to me a much more viable solution in the short term and it certainly possible to make 3-D forms from ceramics that are impossible to machine or cast, so I don't imagine it will be too long before we have systems which can produce 3-D printed, aluminium copper or silver millimetre wave components

[@flikflak24]

I would recommend getting some ETP eco grip in your most used endmill sizes ( since it's basicly a ER collet to hydraulic adapter ( you use the same holder but throw the coller itself and the nut away) so higher grip. Better damping and the ETP you can dile in the runout of the tool. Makeing it way better then a normal ER collet And for that taper in the horn I would make the finish path go from the bottom up instead of top down. That way the absolute "center/middle " of the tool which basically don't spin isn't in contact with the material and should give you a slightly better finish at no extra cost in anyway ( except for the "brown spot" factor ) Btw does it have through spindle cooling ?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Sadly, no through-spindle coolant, which means I can't use a coolant-driven turbine spindle speeder to get the 75,000 rpm I need for the smallest tools (unless I can work out a safe way to run a high pressure coolant line into an intermediate holder). I was about to buy some shrink collets as I have an induction heater, but those ETPs look interesting, especially with having the adjustment screws. Kind of expensive, and some of the smaller tooling has 3mm or 4mm shanks. Might be excellent for the 8/10/12 mm tools though. I tried bottom up on those tapers using a tool with a small corner radius and the finish was excellent. I just had to do some careful work to get a smooth transition above the corner of the step. I'm trying some modelling to see if I can use a smooth curve at the transition, and do a finish cut using a corner-radius endmill all the way. The step is where the additional TE mode is excited, so that the sidelobes of the antenna are suppressed. The phase velocity of the higher mode is different, the plan it to get them to arrive at the orifice with exactly the correct phase relationship to give the best possible cancellation of sidelobes, while ensuring that the axial ratio minimised, so the beam is symmetric. Of course, with the CNC, I could set up a pallet with 8 or more of the horns and machine different corner radii and throat lengths, then measure the actual results. That would help validate the models. At this point, my mother is going to say "seems like a lot of messing about just to talk to your friends on the radio". She watches this channel. Hi mum!!

[@flikflak24]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves i dont know the price of them but i do know that NSK America corporation sell high speed( up to 80000 rpm ) electric in spindle motor's and for the ETP you can put some heat shrink sleeves/ectension on any tool thats smaller then 12mm ( so you only buy 12mm ones and then addapt all the smaller tools to fit into the 12mm holder ( maybe even turn those sleeves/extensions youself on your lathe. so long that the hole and outside is turned in the same setup they should easily be within +-0.0005mm of runout ) btw if the surface finish have any effect on how the horn works and you need a extremely smooth surface finish then i will recommend picking up some MCD diamond braced end mill's. or if you just need/want to make something with a little more bling/shine to them ( though they are only for non magnetic/ no steel material. like copper.aluminium.plastic.titanium and that kind of stuff )

[@johnlambo135]

Hi Neil, thank you for sharing. What a nice milling machine you have .. Keep up the good work 73 John PA7JB

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

After seeing Dom DRO's comments about Gregorian geometry rear-fed dishes on hyperfr.fr , I think I need to try one. Making a concave elliptical subreflector isno harder than a convex hyperbola. I have four dishes which use axially-displaced-ellipse geometry, and I only have one subreflector, so I think I should try to produce three of those so I can use the dishes. They should be good for 24 GHz, maybe 47 GHz. The dishes have a ring caustic focus instead of a point focus like a Cassegrain or Gregorian

[@jasontang6725]

I like where this is going!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I wish I knew where it was going!

[@Rehbet]

This is gonna be good!

[@deltacx1059]

1:03 I always hate going through research papers, they really don't like getting to the point and there tends to be endless fluff before you actually find what you are looking for.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have a curated feed of academic papers that weeds out some of the rubbish, but only as a source of ideas and inspiration. I can skim-read academic papers rapidly, but even so, getting to the really interesting stuff is painful. Some PhD theses are very worthwhile as sources of ideas, but a lot of them are not really deep dives, despite being 100 pages long. I tend to follow the papers done by interesting lead researchers, who put their name to lots of interesting papers by their colleagues and postgrads

[@deltacx1059]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves yes some are really useful and some topics are easier to sift through than others, I'm rather technical and don't have issue finding the info I need in most cases but when I need to dive into specific topics like designing simple optical systems for telescopes, it's very hard to find good explanations on these relationships.

[@neilmanthor]

@@deltacx1059 summarize in chat GPT 💪🏼

[@dfgaJK]

Have you used the Fusion360 scripting features?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I've mostly used pre-built scripts for gears and suchlike but I've tried writing some simple sketch curve generators in C++. Python makes me queasy. I need a real-world application and a sense of panic to beat my ADHD into submission and get something written and tested. The API looks simple enough, just need a problem that needs solving now!

[@clytle374]

Nice CNC. I guess the patent on Fanuc Robodrill tool changer expired?

[@Ardren]

I've no idea. But Brother Speedios have used the same style for a long time (maybe just licensed it?).

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I can't remember the name of the manufacturer of the toolchanger. It's motor-driven and works fairly well, I've had a couple of minor issues with tools sticking in the taper and making quite a thump when they come out, but a tiny smear of grease helps, and it's only happening before the spindle warms up properly, so now I run the daily warm-up cycle before changing any tools. Just need to remember to leave a suitable tool in the spindle when shutting down

[@clytle374]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves They've been around a long time, so probably expired. Does the tool changer engage a gear on spindle when changing? That's how the Fanuc rotates the changer. Most people will argue to never leave a tool in the spindle, keep it perfectly clean, and don't add any lubrication as you never want it to have a change to move and wear.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@clytle374​​⁠ the changer has its own motor drive but it has a cam which is operated by moving the spindle above the zero position. It isn't possible to leave the spindle empty unless you leave one position on the changer empty. There is a gentle air bleed to keep chips out of the bottom of the spindle, but there is also an air blast, which is designed to clear any chips from inside the taper or on the tool holder itself. I'm going to try leaving one position on the changer empty to see if that solve those rather alarming clunks as the ramp changes the first tool holder after a cold start. I cleaned the grease off the tapers of the tool holders and spindle now and there's just a light smear on the pool stud and the grooves where the mounting forks engage

[@zutai1]

I wonder if fronel lenses would be able to be assembled per facet, rather than as a solid piece.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I think that would work, so long as the alignment was good. Perhaps using dovetails or dowels or something, or even a dielectric glue or cement. Perhaps if I can find a source of Rexolite 1422 offcuts, that might work with polystyrene cement

[@zutai1]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves with a dragon scale type pattern of facets, you should be able to get away with far smaller pieces of source materials, and even have the options of different materials per scale. im sure that could lead to some interesting new toys to play with :P

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@zutai1 that's an interesting thought and it's sort of leading the way towards making an adaptive reflectarray, with each scale on a flexure with tiny actuators. I've been thinking a lot about radio telescopes using large phased arrays, but I only have a little more than 1 acre of land and I think it would be much more effective to work with other folks on a VLBI array approach with a baseline of maybe 100 km. That does start to cause difficulties of clock distribution though. Getting a sufficiently stable distributed clock system using GPS-disciplined rubidium clocks or even high stability quartz master oscillators like my Morion MV-89a system in its triple-oven vibration-isolated and magnetically shielded enclosure might be good enough for baselines of tens of km. So many project ideas, so little time...

[@zutai1]

@MachiningandMicrowaves I wonder about using a ditect line of sight coms between nodes for calibration, rather than only GPS or the like. Combined with a faceted franel lens, they should have good enough timing signals, even if you have to bounce it off the atmosphere.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

There are problems with scintillation even on links in the 100km range, but the alternative is hydrogen masers or direct dark fibre. I must remember to buy lottery tickets. I think that with a baseline the size of a county or a small country, it might be possible to use some very well-isolated GPS disciplined oscillators with maybe a 0.01 mHz (yes, millihertz) loop bandwidth to apply long-term stabilisation, but relying on the oscillators themselves for stability and lack of jitter and noise over scales from 100 ns to 10 s. I need to talk to some nearby amateur radio astronomers. Conveniently, I know one of the folks at a nearby astronomy association who have their own small observatory. Project for next year I think. I already have the DiFX correlation/sync code (see www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/difx/difxuserguide.pdf)

[@nathaniellangston5130]

I've machined hundreds if not thousands of variations and full production runs of similar parts for the GBT receivers as well as the NGVLA and VLA and many more, just the ones off the top of my head. Frankly I'm a machinist and not an astro physicist like my father so I don't always know what I'm making, but as a I typically do one offs I always make two of whatever I happen to be making as the setup and machine time to make the second after the first part is done is inconsequential. The telescopes these were designed for are a fair bit bigger, I wonder if any of the stuff I have an actual spare part for is useful to you. On a side note when we created these parts that were sometimes phase shifter too small for ID machining even with custom ground machine tools or just features that were ucnmachineable, we would machine the inverse of the part out of aluminum and grow copper on it for weeks and weeks until the copper was thick enough to machine again. Then we would machine mounting features into the copper, finish the exterior of the rough grown copper, and drill out the majority of the aluminum we could reach but as there were often internal square fins we would then dissolve the rest of the aluminum in Galium or some sort of acid I believe, and then Gold plate the finished copper part. Just something to think about for a potential process for parts you may have thought were impossible to machine but had ideal RF properties. If you have any questions I'd be happy to help as much as I can!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I've been using potassium tetrahydroxozincate as an oxide strip to leave a layer of zinc on machined aluminium mandrels with 0.5 mm wide grooves about 2mm deep. After a while in the zincate, I rinse the mandrel and immerse it into a sodium dicyanoaurate bath with the electrolysis power turned on. The zinc dissolves immediately and a layer of gold starts getting deposited on to the bare unoxidised aluminium surface. Once I have a decent layer of gold, I go straight to a slow copper plating bath to try to build up an electroformed copper body with the grooves now being ridges. Once I have enough copper built up, I grip the mandrel in the lathe or mill and remove any excess material and give me a way to grip it, then drill or bore away as much of the aluminium as I can, then it goes into a warm, agitated sodium hydroxide bath to dissolve the rest of the and aluminium. I love the idea of using gallium! Next step is to set the resulting copper negative into an epoxy fill inside a machined metal body. That saves a bit of time, but assumes I've got enough plating to form flanges and stiffening ribs. I'm getting a lot of failures where the deposited fins are crumbling, I suspect because the slots in the aluminium are closing up at the top and leaving pockets of electrolyte inside the fins. I need to try with 1mm slots, then slice and polish the plated mandrel longitudinally. I hadn't though of doing the gold plating after dissolving the aluminium. I found an article from one of the US university labs but I've lost it. I've read the papers by Canning staff and of course I have the Canning book, from 1982 (23rd edition). I'd love to find that piece from the engineer at the university lab (Caltech maybe?). As always, I have No Idea What I'm Doing, but near-infinite resolve and zero fear of failure.

[@spehropefhany]

I wonder if you could get roughly shaped al. forgings to start with rather than blocks.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@spehropefhany No idea where to find Al forgings other than con-rods maybe. Castings are something I'm doing but the learning curve is scary steep. Trying to avoid bubbles, inclusions, stresses and getting good flow into the moulds is hard!

[@spehropefhany]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I think we had some (like a couple) made special for a part that had to be machined as a relatively big sleeve. It turned out quite a bit cheaper than having it machined out of solid. Economics might be different with your own CNC though, this was all farmed out.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@ I certainly use very thick walled tube to make support rings, I guess it would be a matter of finding existing commercial forgings or extrusions that I could use. most of my "production" runs are under 100 pieces, so there's not much scope for economies of scale. The local agricultural merchant carries large stocks of weird-shaped fittings for tractors and harvesters, I might ask them if I can have a dig around the stores and scrap bins

[@WHJeffB]

Ah... That makes sense. Saw this in my feed and wondered how a "garage/hobby machinist" comes up with the money for a machine like this. So jealous! Spent every dime of a recent small inheritance on a Precision Matthews PM-728VT that I've been dying to own for the last three years. The machine you just purchased is a few levels above that! Enjoy... Would love to have something like that in my "shop".

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Ideally it needs to pay its way, but because I didn't take out a loan, it doesn't matter too much if it doesn't. It's there to make fast-iteration prototyping possible. I'm not falling into the trap of trying to compete with professionals for job-shop work

[@robertwatsonbath]

Thanks Neil. Shiny! Funny looking lathe for making mostly axisymmetric parts :) I was wondering if you'd splashed out on some EM software that you could do parametric sweeps - mind you without a steep discount you could spend as much on that as the mill and it probably wouldn't be as much fun let's be honest.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I'm using scripted parametric sweeps with OpenEMS, that's about my only option unless one of the EM solver vendors takes pity on me and sponsors me with a free licence!

[@platypusbox6479]

My man, living the dream

[@graham8316]

The diy audio world would love to have you if you got into it!

[@fredwalter519]

You spent your grandchildren's inheritance on a CNC milling machine. 🙂

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I must be a Bad Person. Inherited wealth is a bad idea anyway!

[@SarahKchannel]

Titans of CNC just had a video of aluminum machining on SYIL machine, using some fancy diamond bit, perfect mirror finish on a pretty organic shaped part.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Thanks very much for the heads-up. I haven't watched that one yet. PCD and CBN are not ridiculously expensive, unlike monocrystalline diamond. I was talking to my supplier about some boron nitride tooling last week. I'll take a look at young master Gilroy's offering tomorrow. Cutwel do sell single-crystal diamond tooling, but the price is right off the scale. I adapted a FANUC postprocessor for the SYIL to run as a vertical lathe, with tools in a gang fixture in the vice and the part in a chuck in the spindle. The finish using lapped carbide insert lathe tooling was pretty close to a mirror, so way better than needed for sub-1 THz parts, but I couldn't get chips to form, it was all stringy and caused problems with fouling the tool. Maybe I should have driven the tool harder and used a smaller corner radius. I'd draw the line at single tools costing more than $200 I think, but if they could do a 3 or 4 mm diamond tool with decent reach inside a non-circular cavity, with a corner radius, that could be very useful.

[@SarahKchannel]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I think the material / product was called MCD, some monocrystaline diamond type material. Impressive results - but as you suggested, at a impressive price most likely :)

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@SarahKchannel The cutters from my tooling supplier are priced between 1500 GBP and 6000 GBP. Maybe OK for a university lab, aerospace contractor or high-end optics supplier, but a little outside my comfort zone right now. Still going to watch what Titan and his team have to say. Underneath the showmanship, they are solid.

[@HexenzirkelZuluhed]

Bold. I love it.

[@robwalmsley8235]

Always enjoyed your videos.....im not into radio at all..some terminology leaves me blank faced...i enjoy the machining, problem solving , attention to detail and your presentation style.....with your technical dialogue im hanging on by my nails a bit but am keeping up with the story and enjoying it thankyou.... you appear to be enjoying the start of another golden era in your career/hobby etc....a bit of a transition.......i hope it continues to be fun....hope we'll see the lathe and mill from time to time

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@robwalmsley8235 CNC action shots are not very exciting, so there will still be plenty of lathe and manual mill work going on while the CNC mill does the boring, repetitious work. I'm just a total nerd for anything with a good dose of maths and science in the workings. I have some more spy device reconstructions in the pipeline, as well as some deep dives into the construction and tech behind things like Gyrotrons, Pierce guns, IMPATTs, Amplitrons, Carcinotrons and molecular gas masers.

[@dfgaJK]

That machine is very nice!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

It's "assembled in China" rather than "made in China", they've used excellent parts from several countries, and so far, the engineering seems to be way better than the price point would suggest. Let's see how it works in 5 years!

[@leroyjenkins3580]

Congratulations on the mill.

[@leroyjenkins3580]

Also, with proper fixturing you can mill your printed parts and save them

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I haven't tried, but I guess I could so some interesting thing on stiff materials. I'm using a lot of CF-PLA at the moment, not sure how that would machine, guess I need to find out!

[@leroyjenkins3580]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves uncoated endmills are best for the cuts. Just look at the material and what you're doing when gripping it. Using plugs to reinforce from flex works a treat

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have some fancy single-flute lapped carbide cutters intended for plastics and laminates, including some that are down-cutting. Lots to think about!

[@leroyjenkins3580]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves on the right path. I've always respected manual machinist because it's such a dark art and backlash actually helps so much. CNC is a bit different with antibacklash. Helps, but hinders sometimes.

[@JonathanSteinert]

I want to flatten the sticker on your mic stand! (okay back to watching the video)

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I cannot believe I didn't use one of the vinyl stickers. I filmed that a few weeks ago and noticed immediately I edited the previous video. Now it's MUCH shinier!

[@BobGP1]

My grandfather use to be in you hobby but was old-school doing it all by hand, this is oddly like like chatting with him throughout my childhood. Anyway I'm wondering if surface finish/quality would have a effect? Question as a odd watchmaker.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

It comes down to scattering and surface conduction losses. Very similar to getting mirror finishes on optical equipment. I aim for 1/20th of a wavelength RMS error, so at 122 GHz, with 2.4 mm wavelength, that's over 100 micrometres across the whole surface. I like to get better than that locally, especially inside waveguide bores, where scattering can cause unwanted TE/TM modes as well as losses. Even so, a 5 micrometre finish is good enough. Professional pride makes me want to do better if I can though, especially if I'm using gold overplating

[@BobGP1]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I just found a plating video you have I might have some sujestions on plating in the features/pits/grooves depending on your if you want from my industry. As for plastic covers that are transparent vacuum molded should be a good shout as I asked a friend in the industry who gave me two hours of lessons on the phone. Again I can expand if it would help, but you seem very well versed in manufacturing and your hobby. It's been very nice following you videos so far. Thank you. My grandfather would have loved your channel.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I was thinking about the old vacuum forming machine I used in the 1970s and whether there's a non-polar thermoplastic sheet material that is UV resistant with negligible water absorption and a loss tangent less than about 0.005. GRP is the usual solution, but HDPE and polycarbonate are reasonable solutions. I've machined some from PTFE, but that's a very expensive solution

[@BobGP1]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves from what I remember there's a few thermo plastics that will do the trick though I'm afraid I will have to ask for that list on my friends next day off. Though I used to know the owner of the company who made the drums that covered the old mobile phone antennas, the big round ones from the days of blackberry and Nokia. I'll have to reconnect as its been a long time since he moved to Bulgaria and I lost a brilliant client. But that said I remember him telling me about the process, exact heating to ensure equal thinning over the whole drum for strength and transparency. His company was the only one that could do this in Europe at the time. It was fascinating. It's been decades since I have used a vacuum mold it was one of my favourite toys for prototyping. I'll do my best to get back to you soon with information feel free to contact me I'm longterm ill so this is the first brain workout for a long time so having fun.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have some polyethylene injection-moulded covers used for telephone joints by British Telecom, they are quite transparent to microwaves and they are very close to a half-wave thick after allowing for the relative permittivity of the material, so have no effect on the radiation pattern. Styrene sheets (sometimes called high-impact polystyrene) are excellent RF dielectrics, but I think their UV survival might be limited. PVC is pretty disastrous, it crumbles to powder after a few years in sunlight. PE plumbing pipes work well, but I'd really like to have the ability to create my own shapes and sizes

[@zebedie2]

Generally diy machines tend to be cheaper such as the printnc, but they do require a lot of fiddling to get up and running. The full blown machines like you've got there probably make sense if your selling something your making as the cost of the machine as you've said is very large.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I should be able to recoup the capital cost of the machine in less than 3 years doing high-value low-volume work, but I've just been beaten to market on one product, and I'm not going to compete on price. I'm going up-market, with silver and gold plating and only looking at a small proportion of the market. Most CNC shops would think of the X5 as a tiny machine, but the thing weighs more than two tons

[@clauskadrnoschka553]

Love the „CEE“-mug ❤💪

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I am a huge fan of Karen's camera work. I must get some mugs and other merch sorted out!

[@paradox_1729]

What add ons did you buy for your SYIL X5? also.. what controller Siemens or fanuc??

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@paradox_1729 LNC6800 controller with 20k 3.7 kW spindle and tool measurer. Didn't get 4th axis or oil mist filter or Renishaw probe. Siemens controller was much more expensive, so was the Syntec. No Fanuc option at the time.

[@normbarrows2]

You're lucky to have a hobby you are passionate enough about to spend big money. I came into money, have no need to work, but have no passion (at the moment), so I waste half my days telling KZbin "I'm not interested in this video". I watched your video out of curiosity.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@normbarrows2 I've reached an age where nobody (except my mother) gets to tell me how to behave and live my life. The way I see it, if I make proper use of the tools I've bought, I might get my money back in four or five years or even sooner. Then I can spend it all over again on even more tools and testgear! I would rather have regrets about doing something than not doing something, but I don't really go in for regrets

[@markrainford1219]

Have you thought about taking up golf?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

"A good walk, spoiled" as Mark Twain didn't say...

[@willibaldkothgassner4383]

Perfect, thanks!

[@SAILBOATJACARANDA]

Cool stuff bud.

[@Qsderto]

Did you also buy a sharpening machine for drills and cutters?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have an Alexander D-bit grinder, but most of my tooling has inserts or is carbide with parabolic flutes or variable pitch, or is absolutely tiny, so it's very hard to grind them, even with diamond cup wheels. I rarely bother sharpening very small drills. I can grind split points by hand at 4mm up

[@SarahKchannel]

I am curious how all of this would translate to 3D metal printing, or fused deposition printing.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I've been talking to a 3D metal fab about a sponsorship deal but they don't offer high conductivity materials, plus there are complex shrinkage metrics to deal with and it's unclear how hollow forms like waveguides or resonant cavities would behave at the corners. Maybe if printed at an angle to limit overhang? Getting a sufficiently conductive and smooth internal finish to prevent scattering will be challenging, and getting plating to adhere evenly inside concave voids will be hard as a hard thing. Electropolishing will be similarly challenging. I'm thinking mostly about using that technology for extremely complex geometries that support other components, like gimbals and handles and solid-looking metal parts that have lattices internally. At lowish frequencies, the tolerances and finishes might be acceptable, but the parts would be very large. Copper, silver, or at a pinch, aluminium, would be good materials, 316 stainless or bronzes, less so

[@SarahKchannel]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves hence me being curious - I know very little about RF, a bit more about 3D printing.. but nothing at this level. Honeycomb or iso-grid structures, like the support of a fish seem like logical candidates - yet metal 3D printing is most offered on smalish part, nothing like dish shaped structures. Yet some of the sintered prints machine quit OK for finishing passes.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@SarahKchannel The application I'm considering is a reflectarray, where you have a large number of individual curved hexagonal facets, each with a set of three mounts which are driven by small actuators so you can modify the direction of the beam of the "dish" and sweep it rapidly without having to move massive stiff structures. The other application I'd love to try is waveguide combiners, where you have eight or more rectangular hollow tubes of varying heights, which have input waveguide flanges and which are then merged in a sort of tree structure, inside a solid matrix. T radio frequency energy sent into each port combines in phase and appears out of the output port with almost 8 times the power. There is a serious limit to the amount of power a single device can produce at those frequencies, so a combiner like that is a simple, passive solution to achieve better output power. Milling them from solid is a nightmare job because you can't have joints other than along the broad faces, so it isn't at all easy to get the mechanical arrangement right. A 3D printed version could have a complex interweave of curved tubes to minimise the envelope of the entire structure

[@Mike-H_UK]

Great video, many thanks.

[@sparc5]

Did you get 3 phase power to your shop? Can you still afford retirement?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@sparc5 I have two other pensions, and I am still working part time as an IT security architect and data network engineer I bought a 10 hp solid state inverter and sinewave filter, but the excessive earth leakage current during start-up of some of the solid state controllers in the X5 caused a breaker to trip. The resulting transient destroyed one channel on the inverter. The supplier had never heard of this failure before, so I purchased a second unit because I needed to get the X5 up and running. That also blew up with a different fault, so I purchased a rotary converter that is horribly noisy but entirely bulletproof. Probably my ADHD has kicked in, but I haven't pursued the supplier yet. The electricity supplier wanted around £11,000 to make the connection for three phase. The noise from the rotary converter limits what I can do about machining late into the night but might actually be a good thing, but I've lost over £3000 as a result of this mess

[@sparc5]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves ouch! Not a cheap hobby. Another thing that occurred to me when watching is how you're just picking up CAD and CNC. Each of these has such a steep learning curve that is probably lost on your audience. I'm glad you decided to include the part of you breaking the bit so we didn't get the impression you're superhuman.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@sparc5 i've been very clear with myself so that I don't have any wild dreams of becoming a profitable job shop. I've only spent money that I can afford to lose, I haven't borrowed a cent to fund any of my new toys. This was all about shortening the development cycle and allowing me to make what would otherwise be expensive mistakes, in the privacy of my own workshop.

[@sparc5]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves yes. I kept waiting to hear the part where you recoup your pension and it never came. Makes sense to spend the money, you can't take it with you.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

A friend of mine started with early signs of dementia, and had some other age-related mobility issues. She'd lived her life extremely well, doing everything she could as she knew there was a good change that her genetics would come to bite her. Before things got terrible, she got her affairs fully in order, ordered some materials from the dark web, wrote a lot of letters and emails, and left this life on her own terms. I hope I have the strength of will to emulate her if I go the same way. My mum is 94 and still going strong as ever though, and my gran lived to be 101 and my uncle into his 90s, but those two had dementia, so I'm just going for it, flat out while I can.

[@snithereens]

I am a gear head, always into nice gear to try out and tinker with. Subtractive or additive modeling including CAD is unchartered land for me. Your content is very interesting though. I don't get the IRL use for your builds. You design and construct antennas for microwave radio, is that it? What's the actual application for those? Is it RX or TX or both? Would you please give a hint to one of your videos, so I could get more behind your activity? Thanks a lot!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I've been a bit inscrutable about how I use these things, mostly because a lot of what I make is used by other folks around the world. My key interests are in pushing the limits of communication via moonbounce/earth-moon-earth reflection, rain/snow/hail forward scatter (Mie/Rayleigh), aircraft as passive over-the-horizon reflectors, satellite communications, using larger LEO sats and the International Space Station as passive reflectors, troposcatter, tropospheric ducting, structure/geology reflections, mmWave imaging, deep space network satellite monitoring and generally pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible in microwave/mmWave/infra-red/optical communications. I'll try to show some of the usage in upcoming videos

[@snithereens]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves thank you! I f I knew my maths I would take lots of joy in trying how far I could think things like the ones you mentioned… It’s always a pleasure to have people „around“ who are smarter thinkers than oneself, I reckon. So, please give us insights into your world!👍🏻

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I created a second channel for deep dives into the maths and physics, but time pressures beat me. I really should do some vids about the process and science, with very little editing or fancy graphics. Too much Stuff To Do right now though

[@snithereens]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves ready to watch the content when ever you are, Sir!💛🍀

[@TheOwlman]

I am assuming that is 5000lb and not £5000 with that kit! You are a man of dedication 👍

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Yeah, I'm going a bit American about using pounds instead of tonnes/tons. It's a fair bit over 2000 kg. Costs to date including tooling, holders, vices, inverters/converters, fluids and accessories, plus fancy new Hydrovane compressors, refrigerant air-drying, building works and installation costs don't leave much change out of £45k, but that's all sunk cost and I'm ignoring any thoughts about making it pay for itself. I'd have frittered the money away on testgear or a van or antennas or a new car anyway.

[@TheOwlman]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I was assuming around 50k and if you can't spend your money on the things you want at our age when can you?!!? During my brother in law's army service in his youth he visited many places that he always intended to go back to in order to actually _see_ them. This just never happened, so he spent decades working away and never taking holidays, so when he finally retired (one false start... just a couple more contracts... honest) he realised that he had a massive nest egg and nothing to do with it. His solution was to find a partner and take at least 4 holidays a year, and it has served him very well. If you hang onto it then it just goes into the pockets of the care provider company directors and shareholders when you finally become incapable of independent living, so enjoy it while you can.

[@rfengr00]

Nice work. What kind of radios are you using with the 24 & 40 GHz stuff. Transverters?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@rfengr00 Kuhne transverters on 24 and 47GHz, plus some Wavelab units on 24. I have a 3 m solid prime focus - 2.4 and 1.8 meter solid offset but I am unlikely to be able to communicate via the moon on 24 GHz without a lot more power. Maybe just combining the outputs from four wave lab units would be sufficient if I use the largest dish . A 3 m dish on 24 GHz is really too large to illuminate the moon effectively, so I'll probably start with the 2.4 offset and keep the three meter dish for 3.4, 5.7 and 10 GHz.

[@rfengr00]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves where did you obtain the 3 m prime focus?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@rfengr00 it used to be on top of a BBC building in Belfast I think. It's branded General Dynamics.

[@WernerBeroux]

Does it mean you're going to manage having decent WiFi coverage at home? Slightly joking, I wish I had some directional 2.4GHz antenna for wifi

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Heh heh, I have gigabit fibre into the machine shop and 5 GHz wifi everywhere now. I have a 1 metre dish and feed on 2.4 GHz that puts a decent signal into the geostationary satellite QO-100 at 36,000 km above Qatar using 800 mW, so range isn't a problem! I'm working on some omnidirectional lens antennas for the 5 GHz wifi, perhaps I should do one for 2.4 GHz with a tailored pattern to improve coverage down my garden. Have to stay within the legal limits, but if I can put some deep nulls on the access points/routers in my neighbours' houses, that might improve throughput on the lowband wifi channels.

[@jimsvideos7201]

Here is the origin of the expression “one of,” as in the engineer sending a drawing downstairs with a note reading “make one of these, we’ll see if it fits.”

[@campbellmorrison8540]

Wow you are brave but I can definitely see the attraction as I too have a manual lathe and mill. Over and above learning how to drive the damned thing all the tooling worries me as it seems inordinately expensive even from China. I dont make anything like RF stuff so I think if Im going down the path of CNC I will start with a laser cutter, something that will cut thin metal would be my dream

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I just had an offer of a fibre MOPA laser unit, but it doesn't cut metal foil. I use my Creality laser to make assembly fixtures, boxes and all sorts of things that I never expected. I have a manual plasma cutter but I'd certainly like to have a CNC plasma table for cutting plate. Wire EDM is the other thing I would like to have available.

[@campbellmorrison8540]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yes wire EDM is incredible, I have a friend with one but the setup etc and keeping it running is on a whole other level, you really need access to pretty good metrology gear. I do have access to a similar laser for plastics and rubber etc but I really want metal and its quite a lot more expensive

[@philorkill]

My respects good sir.

[@AlessioSangalli]

Do you use straight water as coolant??

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

It's an 8% solution of Cutsol Crystal Cool fully synthetic coolant from Cutwel UK.

[@AlessioSangalli]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves 😲

[@JamesChurchill]

Yikes, your AMS is reporting very high humidity - if you haven't already removed the original dessicant bags from it I'd do so now, they have a tendency to leak water once they get saturated!

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I'd had the AMS in bits to clear out some jammed bits. The filament had been in the dryer, or was freshly opened, and I'd just fitted new dessicant bags. An hour later, it stopped complaining! Very well spotted!

[@platin2148]

Where do you get the Material from?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Local metal stockholders mostly, Aalco, Smiths, Barugh. I buy large orders and get a reasonable deal. For odd small jobs, I use 1stchoicemetals.co.uk

[@deuterium8236]

Always like you're video's. I have very similar kit but a different set of esoteric hobbies. You should consider a resin printer to prototype some parts. Bit of a learning curve for precision prints and unfortunately the curve is very different than filament printers. Haven't had to metal coat resin yet, figure plan B would be vacuum sputtering if some electroless method didn't work. Cheers-Peter

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

After the deep dive I did into industrial resin printers when I visited Fortify and Rogers Corp in the US for the kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYqwg5mtZdqKotk video, the affordable hobbyist+ resin machines feel a bit limited. I keep getting offers of machines for free, but I don't feel I'd get enough use from one at the moment. If I start to do a lot of centrifugal casting, that might change. Sadly, there isn't really an economically-viable material that could be used to make gradient index lenses on a resin printer. If I can get the controller for my turbomolecular pump running, I'll be doing some PVD and simple sputtering. I don't know how resins would behave in terms of outgassing under vacuum, and whether a metal coating would remain attached and take an electroformed/plated overlayer. It would be fun finding out though

[@jimurrata6785]

@@deuterium8236 Ben Krasnow has some interesting videos on sputtering/vapor deposition in the garage/shed. It's a shame he has cut back on uploads but that probably means he's been working on some other outrageous projects.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Yep, there's a surprising number of folks making and using magnetron sources. On a different slant, I need to find a paper on cylindrical cold-cathode magnetron electron guns so get enough free electrons to make a few amps of current in a hard vacuum. The usual sources are intended to maximise ion production, I want to maximise electron production instead. Paywalls are everywhere and the usual tools don't seem to have them indexed. Not that I'd ever use such tools, obvs, no no no.

[@dfgaJK]

What was the accident?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

It involved a septic tank, a pressure washer, half a gallon of boiling water spilled on my left hand, my ankles getting tangled in the pressure hoses, causing me to do a spectacular fall, resulting in a high-speed impact with a brick wall with my right arm, an urgent visit to the emergency room burns specialists, and a HUGE contusion. My right arm was black from my palm to my bicep. A LOT of ouchies were involved. Superb service from the National Health Service throughout my recovery. Sadly it is not on video and the photos are WAAAAY to gruesome for KZbin. Think Zombie Apocalypse. Almost fully healed now apart from some nerve damage and rotator cuff issues. 2/10 would not recommend

[@LarsBohr5]

I wonder “ mark each one with its particular parameters “ , just an excuse to play with the engraving function? 😁

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I feel so SEEN! Yes, it's just an excuse to play. It's super useful though, as a 0.25 mm difference in pin offset is hard to see by eye

[@LarsBohr5]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I’d probably do the same myself, nice work!

[@ikbendusan]

what coolant are you using?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Cutsol Crystal Cool from Cutwel UK. I tried to get some Blaser fully-synth coolant, but couldn't even get a response to my sales enquiry. Terrible customer service. I really hate having to go through sales people when all I want is to buy a barrel of forbidden juice dammit. Especially when most of my shopping is done at 3 am on a Sunday morning. No excuse for not having an online shop surely?

[@ikbendusan]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves i guess you mean blaser synergy 735? we were advised (by our blaser dealer) not to use full synthetic because it may be hard on the seals of the machine and cause them to leak and eventually fail, that synergy 735 specifically leaves a very sticky residue, and that it's really only meant for specific alloys or it reacts with it and make the surface splotchy or something. my boss wanted to try some zebora full synthetic for filming purposes, but because we've been using a mineral oil based emulsion coolant (also from blaser; multicool mc610) it was never going to be perfectly clear, even after flushing the system many times. stability-wise and odor-wise i've actually been pretty happy with mc610, no bacteria even though our machine sits around for weeks at a time and good surface finishes; it just doesn't look like water haha full synth is supposedly also worse for your skin and general health than oil based coolants

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@ikbendusan my original reason was so that I could use a spinning disc camera enclosure and see-through to the workpiece through the supposedly clear solution. That all works fine until you have tools of any significant diameter which create a dense spray which scatter light even though it's transparent. I'll probably, use the rest of this 5 gallon drum and then look at alternatives. It is extremely well-behaved and the residue isn't particularly sticky but then I don't leave the machine idle for more than a day if I happen to be away. It's very easy to separate the tramp oil from the total loss way lubrication. I just use oil absorbent sheets on top of the coolant tanks once a week. I haven't noticed any problems with the Cutwel fluid on my skin although some of the traditional cutting oils do give me dermatitis. Ester-based cutting oil seems to be fine and hydraulic and way oil don't seem to affect me either. The value of being able to film inside the machine isn't as great as I expected anyway it's kind of boring after the first 20 clips. I might try using my mist lubricator for anything where the machining is really interesting, but removing large quantities of material at high rates in aluminium without the flood coolant is a recipe for disaster, as I found my cost when trying to film an expensive 6 mm cutter throwing rooster tails at high removal rates

[@BedroomMachinist]

If you ever need amything at all Feel free to reach out, tools, programming, or just someone to bounce your thoughts off of! Id love to have a convo sometime, just found the channel and im immersing myself in your world. Very impressive!

[@peterh1386]

I have that issue of the Beano.... 😁

[@Rustinox]

I would say" Go for it". But I see you already do that :)

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@Rustinox Hi Michel, now I want a CNC Shaper!

[@Rustinox]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I would like to CNC a shaper, but I have to find a good machine first. With a hydraulic ram.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

Oh yes, now that would be something to see! Hope you find one.

[@kkrolik2106]

Now buy you self small furnace to re-melt failed designs and chips to cast brand new stock in moulds ;)

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

I have a propane/waste oil furnace that is OK for melting aluminium, bronze and copper, and an induction machine that is good for smaller parts. My supply of scrap engines and other aluminium parts has dried up. I need to get my trailer repaired so I can go out on the scrounge for suitable scrap for larger castings. Definitely worth making new bar stock from offcuts and wrecked parts though, so long as I can perfect my fluxing and dross-removal skills!

[@spr00sem00se]

There was a moment there when I thought 5000 pound meant 5000 GBP not 5000LB, I would have been ordering one immediately.

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

@@spr00sem00se That's me trying to speak imperial to the 40% of my audience from non-metric regions!

[@spr00sem00se]

@@MachiningandMicrowaves lol, just ignore them, use kilograms, everyone knows its the future anyway :) I really did take a double look at the fottage so see if you said 5000 pounds, and immediately thought the machine must be junk, but looks amazing, then i twigged, oh well

[@pcka12]

Is that 5000 pounds weight for the new machine?

[@MachiningandMicrowaves]

A little over 2100 kg, so more like 4600 pounds weight.

[@MarcinKryszak]

So im doing RF components on cnc daily, and im watching on Sunday, other guy doing it.