And I’ve hit a milestone. The Y-axis is more or less done. Yay!
I had to build a base for everything to sit on. so I cut out a piece of 8″x8″ aluminum plate that I’ve had sitting around for some years, and started the long process of milling it to size. This wouldn’t be any trouble, except that I only have 6″ of cross travel on my mill. It’s fixture time!
I took the big vise off the mill table, set down a couple of 1-2-3 blocks, and clamped down the plate. I indicated off the factory edge, and decided I would call it good enough at 0.0005″ out over 8″. It only took a few minutes to get there, at which point I tightened all the clamps, checked it again, and started milling. I then realized that I had no calipers that could measure more than 6″, so I had no accurate way of measuring the plate’s dimensions. I also realized that it’s not a critical plate and so the dimensions don’t really matter. I could be off by 0.1″ and it wouldn’t matter.
After conventional milling away most of the cut, I took a 0.005″ climb cut to clean up the edge. I think the finish looks nice. There’s some rippling, but that’s mostly due to the fact that I’m cranking the table by hand. A powerfeed is on my list of tooling to buy when I get more money. Anyway….
Mill the other side and it’s all good for drilling. And so drilling happened. Followed by tapping.
Bolt everything together with a linear guide coupler made from some aluminum plate, and it’s pretend-o-mill time! This is basically the Y-axis. Motors are in the mail.
