3 Axis Foam Cutting Mill

3 - Axis Foam Cutting Mill - Part 6

Roughing in the Basic Machine

This image captures a unique moment, when a clean stretch of time lays ahead, all materials are ready and the project has the potential to be anything.

This also gives me a chance to work with a cool material called MDF (Medium Density Fibre-Board). There's a monster MDF plant (formerly MacMillian Blodel) that cranks out tons of the stuff about 70Kms north of us here.

It's a Tuesday morning, raining now, thier calling for 10cm of snow by tomorrow, and I have the week off...

After sketching, scratching, 2 coffees and an arm load of firewood, this is as far as I've got.

This is basically what I recall from the SuperTech.com Mini-Robo fixed gantry machine. The limiting factor was the length of the polished rods from wide carriage printers that have been cannibalized. The inner dimensioning is 18" X 18". Which will allow approx 12" by 12" of travel on the X & Y plane. The Z Axis will have approx 3" of travel over the table.

The rods are just placed for effect ...

In an effort to keep things lined-up I clamped the matching pieces before drilling pilot holes.

The MDF is like a really dense cardboard, almost like a Fibre-Board... to this point it's easy to cut, drill sand whatever...

I drilled 1/2" holes for the rods to sit in, and for the crank side of the Lead screw for manual adjustments and setup.

The Opening for the Stepper Motors was drilled with a hole saw.

The Rods won't be only held by the rough holes. I've made-up casting patterns for adjustable blocks that will allow me to make any final adjustments to true up the axis for both smooth operation and perpendicularity of the axis to each other.

Nothing is glued or screwed, just clamped into place. This is a tedious part of the job, check for true, file, cut, sand... reclamp and retest.

I determined the squared corner of the base section and have used it as the reference for Rod hole placement, always measuring from either side of that corner.

The effort is starting to pay off as it naturally sits quite square now.

Remember these things? A Visa/Mastercard embosser. This one has been in a drawer for years now and has missed the landfill only because it was under a pile of papers.

It's construction is quite impressive, I guess that's where all that interest goes to. R & D...

After removing all the plastic, card guides and the date roller and imprint mechanism, this is what is left.

Extremely smooth rolling with no play laterally or binding in it's movement.

Since it has an Alum chassis, mounting drive components shouldn't cause any problems.

This is a close-up of the casting and roller assembly.

The nylon wheels appear to be quite hard and hopefully will be up to the task of prolonged use.

As always, I get a kick out of using an item for a completely different purpose than what it was intended. But only if it's effective in it's function...

To this point I think that this mechanism is more compact and accurate than what ever I would have devised, though at the first sign of grief it's gone...

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