Tie fighter machining challenge (long version: less talk, more chips!)

[@moja2177]

I'd love to see a separate video on the manual to cnc conversion. nice video btw!

[@EcoMouseChannel]

We seem to have the same lathe... I'd like to see how you converted yours to CNC.

[@codemakeshare]

I hope to find time to put some more detailed info together! In short, I kept the z-axis screw for now (not the best, has some backlash), and replaced the x-axis screw with a 14mm precision-ground ballscrew from ebay. The x-axis screw has a belt drive in the back (briefly shown in the video, with a 3D-printed stepper mount). The z-axis has a closed-loop hybrid stepper directly mounted on the right-hand side. So it's still fully usable as a manual machine (both handwheels work). But I'm planning to replace the z-axis screw with a 1605 ballscrew next, to remove the backlash and reduce friction. It struggles a bit on heavy cuts. To drive it, I'm using GRBL on an Arduino-Mega. The user interface is a self-written GUI running on a raspberry pi with touch screen (it's in my github, lint.py in the g-mint repository).

[@concentricmachining4636]

This is really awesome and I like the fact that it is all once piece! I am looking forward to seeing how each person handled the material. So far the from a solid (as done here) and brazed / epoxied from several parts are the go to. I also love just how tiny it is! What did you use to make the 4th axis G-Code?

[@codemakeshare]

Thanks! I'd love to say that I saw it as a challenge to make it out of one piece, but maybe it's just that I'm a computer guy, and it's my natural laziness when it comes to repetitive work (let the computer do the work :) ) For the 4th axis code: the lathe code was generated with my software from the part outline (drop-to-outline operations, and line following). The 4-axis milling was hand-coded, don't have algorithms for it yet. I used the live visualisation against the loaded 3D file to check if the toolpaths are in the right place (try-and-see approach...). After doing it for one side, it was a lot of copy-paste, just changing the angle.

[@concentricmachining4636]

@@codemakeshare Awesome! As a fellow software guy I am well experienced in the copy / paste method of development and design! Loving the videos btw looking forward to the next project!

[@Reburned32]

So little views???? WHY!!!!!!!!

[@codemakeshare]

I don't know! But now it's one more - thanks for watching :)

[@Reburned32]

@@codemakeshare Man, you have soooo much good ideas and genius solutions, wish you could make more videos. Sad, if you ment no more videos...

[@codemakeshare]

@@Reburned32 I still have a lot more material, unfortunately the day job is taking up way too much time at the moment... hopefully things relax again next year :)

[@Reburned32]

@@codemakeshare Thank you ,ill be waiting for new videos :D