Alright. Taxes are done. Update time. Sorry for the delays on that.
I’ll start with a brief timeline update here: No chips made just yet. I had some family medical stuff pop up that sucked most of my free time and energy up for a few weeks. Not much more to say at the moment about the medical stuff other than everything is fine now. Might share a bit more later on, but for the moment there’s not much to tell. The stress kinda knocked the fight out of me as far as staying after hours until 3AM goes, but I’m back in it now. I’m obviously running a bit behind as I’ve missed my goal of having the first few units ready by now, but I’ll still be shipping all earlies by end of April.
I’ll be cutting the fixtures at some point this week while I finish the last client order I still need to get out the door, and then I’ll be turning my attention to the Queen Bee. I have 50Lb of grade 5 titanium in the mail and on its way to me from Maine as we speak. The ETA on that is the 20th, and I’ll start by processing it into stock material. Lots of places wanted to charge me upwards of 10$ a cut, so I’ll just do it myself.
I have the programs for the lathe and mill ready to go! I even managed to get myself up and running with a more advanced CAM simulation model, though that’s more for my day job than this. Still super useful, though.
Anyway, I wanted to show off some of the programming stuff. First a picture to confuse you:
Behold the machining sequence. This gigantic mess of spaghetti is what’s gonna cut our wings. Or at least the parts that are cut in the lathe. What’s super nice about my CAM program is that I can simulate what’s gonna happen in the machine.
It is perhaps a little easier to see in this shot where material is being removed with the model in place. It even goes as far as figuring out what material may or may not be touched by the paths I create so I can predict how well the theoretical stuff will match what pops out the machine:
For example you can see a thin blue line inside the cup where the radius of my insert isn’t quite small enough to cut away all the material I want.
The simulation models also let me create my fixtures for use in the machine! I created models for all of the relevant tools and fixtures purchased with the deposit money, most notably the step collets and expansion collets I needed to use for this project:
Then I can toss those things into my CAM program and mount the workpiece into them:
And further than that, make sure that I won’t crash by telling me where my tools are going to end up like so:
And allow me to see what the final result should look like in the machine:
