Milling boxes in fixtures

As Koka Nikoladze had the need to machine some holes in some electronic enclosures, we produced some jigs to repetedly mounting and machining of these boxes.

For Bernt Isak's project, The Cosmos, we made a similar jig, also for cutting out por't for the Arduino's interface.

Welding aluminium strucures

This was a quick test of assembling aluminium parts.

As one can see in the lower left corner of this structure, the crossbrace, is intersecting through the sideplates. The hole i milled for the sidebraces has extended radiuses so that they can be filled with weld. i Used TIG for this one, that left a super clean, nice weld. After welding, i milled it away, to leave a flat and nice surface.

CNC milled suitcase base

A frind of mine was tired of hauling her heavy suitcase around town, with the small wheels getting stuck everywhere. I made her the solution: a big, thick aluminium plate with huge wheels! 

I used the shell function in Autodesk Fusion 360, together with the web function to remove as much material as possible without compromising on rigidity.

Concrete casting workshop

Yesterday i and Christina Lewis held a concrete casting at Bitraf.
The workshop was meant to be a collective tryout of concrete as material for both art and technology.
We used a thin, low viscosity concrete, intended for use as garage floors.


We did two rounds of castings, in the second round, we added colour in the concrete. The color was a challenge in it self, as adding any substance to the concrete, alters its properties. The one i ended up using, is a pigment in powder form, normaly used for painting chalk walls

For the big candle holder shown at the intro, i milled a mold from building insulation using a 10mm milling bit for removing the bulk of the material, then finishing it up with the 6mm long ball nose.


For the small project that we did over the weekend, using a drill mounted spiral mixer in a bucket where sufficient. For the molds, we used the already mentioned machined foam block, as well as cut bottles, coke cans, crumbled paper cups, and 3d printed molds.

The 3D printed molds where especially interesting, as the low viscosity concrete capture every minute details from the print.

More results from the workshop:

 If you want to try this out yourself, have a lookout for the next workshop at Bitraf's meetup.

Assembling giant vacuum wall

Months ago i agreed on designing and manufacture a 2100x2500 vacuum wall for Norwegian artist pushwagner´s photo studio.

After producing the technical drawings, the contract was signed, and the product taken into production at Fellesverkstedet

Below are som photos from the production of the vacuum wall.

The vacuumwall must be adjustable. Therefore, mechanical valves where added in form of PE slides.

As a consequence of this, the vall became very thick, and several hundred screws had to be used to keep it from imploding from the underpressure.

This is one of the two halves making up the vacuum wall under assembly.

Here, the two halves of the vacuum table stands ready for delivery and mounting at the customers photo studio:

Autodesk Fusion 360

Yesterday, i and Christian Anker from bitraf spent all day produsing parts using Autodesk Fusion 360's CAM module. We produced the toolpaths on my macbook air, then seamlesly beamed them over to the CNC machine using Dropbox.

The more we learn about production technology, the more we can reduce the turnaround time from concept to reality. For the case of the two copper pieces below, that time ended up at 43 minutes.

Before the copper parts where made, prototypes where made in aluminium. The 3D milling where done at 25mm/sek, with a 1/8 inch ballnose mill.

This assembly is the hammer parts of Koka nicoladze´s new instrument; the solenoid drummer.

As we did further adventures into CNC milling with the shopbot, Christian anker decided he wanted to produce the build platform for his huge part for his 3D printer.

As it must be perfectly flat, it had to be facemilled. We decided to do this with this 32 mm milling bit.

This is the finished part rigth after milling:

Since teaching Christian to mill aluminium with the shopbot CNC machine, he has produced a number of parts for his 3D printer:

Testing out 3D milling in Fusion 360 once more

Today i did some more testing of Fusion 360`s CAM module.

I made a sample 100 X 100 X 50 body, then made a  T-spline plane ontop of it. I then gave it some random topography to work with.

After boundary filling , the part is ready for Toolpath generation!

I intended to run the first files in foam, so i ramped up the feedrate to 3000mm/min @ 15000 RPM.

I used 10mm two flute HSS tools from GARR for this job, a ballnose for the topography, then a flat end for cutting out the part.

The results where good! At 2,5 mm stepover, the toolpaths are clearly visible.

I continued to use the same file for testing in wood. This was made using only adaptive clearing with a HSS 1FL6 from norswiss.

Rigid FDM delta printer

Altough we have a few FDM printers at Bitraf, i now see the need for having my own at my office. i started to develop a small scale delta printer last week.

The printer is constructed from a plates milled from sheet of 10mm 6082 t651 aluminium.

Movement is performed by NEMA17 steppermotors, and HIWIN linear bearing rails.

This is what i have modeled so far:

As the ultimakers, this design also equips the captured nut concept, in this case M6 nuts, as seen in this cutaway:

In this cutaway, the belt tenison system can been seen in the lower left corner. Notice the stiffening bracket in the middle of the linear rail assembly, and the milled weigth reducing pockets.

These are the main components of the printer, here laid out, ready for toolpath generation.

I decided to use this project as a testcase for Fusion 360`CAM strategies, in this case adaptive clearing.

The milling bits normaly break When peak loads is achived when running into a corner. Therefore, the feedrate must be reduced for the entirety of the toolpath when using normal CAM strategies for avoiding milling bit failure:

What adaptive clearing does, is to slowly dig the milling bit into the material, before performing a series of deep cuts at maximum depth, with optimal chipload. In this way, the tool will not experience peeks in loads, as the tool will have constand load. This reduces the runtime with a suposed 40%

I will spend the next weeks experimenting further with Fusion CAM. This is my first result with adaptive clearing:

Machining a brass hammer

At work some months ago, there where some scraps left of some aluminium broze screws, so i decided to make a hammer out of it.

Since then, it has become one of my favourite tools, and i use it several times a week when doing machining and assembly. Following is some pictures from the machinging of this tool.

Dust extraction for the shopbot

Today me and and Jens Dyvik assembled the new dust extractor for one of the shopbots.

The parts were previously milled out by Jens, using his CAM plugin for rhino, called barkbeetle.

Barkbetle can stream to our projector, so that we can preview files before we run them.

Seen here is the finished parts, along with the prewiew.

Hexapod

Just testing the limit on how many components you can include in a 3D preview from Autodesk 360. Quite a few apearently. The explode view function is intresting.

creating a bar stool using a CNC jig

Tig welding is a precise way of welding. Execelent quality welds can be performed, but, as in most trades, the key to good welding, is good workholding. By using a CNC cut jig, the job gets done quicker, more precise, and the repeatability is good.

In this case, the angle of the stool egs were critical. Jens Dyvik scetched out a rhino model, and cut the parts on the shopbot. Then the jig were assembled, and the Steel tubes put into position before welding.

Here, the stool is welded, and as soon as it cools down, the client will be able to bring it home!

The CNC machine produces a smaller CNC

I produced the parts for a friends smaller CNC, on Bitraf's huge CNC. How cool is that?

The cutting has begun!

The baby CNC! The banana is for scale. NOTE: This is an imperial banana, not a metric one!

Here, the brackets is installed. 

This is the machine with the bridge installed, waiting for the spindle.

The tools used for the roughing and finnishing. The bigger 8mm bit has two flutes, and provides exelent chip removal rates, while the smaller singleflute 6mm leaves a great finish, at the cost of efficience.

For more info on the CNC, follow this link.

PP plastic

I milled som PP plastic with the shopbot today, ran a 6mm singleflute at 18000 RPM 35mm/sek with 8mm pass depth.

The chip formation was good, and the surface quality turned out great!

More welding with jigs!

After learning to make jigs with the CNC, this artist then welded his piece together in the jig.

Welding large, but acurate structures becomes easy when you use a jig.

This jig was made from scrap materials.

It is important to ensure that your workpiece is properly grounded when welding. This connection is done wia this clamp, wich is connected to the welding machine.

CNC milled 3D printer display bezel

 Made the bezel and knob for my friend christian's 3D printer with the shopbot today. This was a 30. min job @20mm/sek with my favourite 6mm singleflute bit.

Making A wax seal

Christina lewis came up with the idea of making her logo into a wax seal. Challenge accepted! So today, i milled the logo itself from a block of aluminium, going slow at 6mm/sek with a 2mm singleflute bit @ 18000 RPM, the handle will be made later from some wood.

we started out with a simplified vector file, wich we then made toolpaths from in Vcarve, the program which writes code to the CNC machine.

The machining process is loud, and draws attention!

The finnished seal:

The end result: