Gte718p ' s CNC project

[Whiskeymike]

Stioc, when importing a dxf from f360, make sure you zoom WAY out. One pet peeve I have with F360 is the scaling when exporting standard measurements. Metric seems to work better. When I import to sheet cam or illustrator(like Inkscape) I can’t see the drawing until I zoom way out, then I have to resize it. I’ve posted in the forums and Autodesk argues that it’s everyone else that doesn’t do scaling properly because they are American made. Despite Inventor exporting them file which is made by same company.

Gte, thanks for documenting your journey. Do you have any pics of items you’ve made? If you had to do it over again and wanted to scale up, do you have a larger mill you would target?

 

[gte718p]

Depends on what I'm doing. Most of the time, I use F360 for CAD/CAM. The EMC post processor works very well. For engraving simple 2.5D cuts I often just draw in Inkscape instead of firing up Fusion. I do a lot of engraving with the mill. Inkscape is far superior to Fusion for that.

The technical name for the screw mapping is screw compensation file. It takes some messing with to get right, especially if you don't have absolute positioning. However once it is setup, it can really help with a sloppy Chinese acme screw. It is not in the basic setup as it is not required and sometimes not desireable.

 

[gte718p]

Gte, thanks for documenting your journey. Do you have any pics of items you’ve made? If you had to do it over again and wanted to scale up, do you have a larger mill you would target?

I do but they are all on the the computer attached to the mill. I have a web cam on it. I always forget to take pictures with my real camera. I imagined that I would post machining to a YouTube channel like Nycnc or Vintage machinery Turns out it is hard work and takes some skill. Who would have guessed.

If money was no object, I would have preferred to do a square column mill. There are definately headaches to resetting and aligning a round column mill. I think it is the Rung-fu 42 that is the same size with a square column. When I bought mine, it was about $800 more expensive. If you are going to use it a lot it may be a worth while upgrade. If I had the room and power I would love to have done a Bridgeport size mill. However, in the real world there are constraints. This mill fits the size, space, and cost constraints I was working with. I have absolutely no regrets.

 

[stioc]

WhiskeyMike, thanks for the tip. See if you have any luck opening the attached file with anything other than F360 (which can read it fine). It's just me trying to trace an image of a car using spline. Just rename it to .dxf (I had to change the extension to .txt to be able to upload it here).

 

[stioc]

Depends on what I'm doing. Most of the time, I use F360 for CAD/CAM. The EMC post processor works very well. For engraving simple 2.5D cuts I often just draw in Inkscape instead of firing up Fusion. I do a lot of engraving with the mill. Inkscape is far superior to Fusion for that.

The technical name for the screw mapping is screw compensation file. It takes some messing with to get right, especially if you don't have absolute positioning. However once it is setup, it can really help with a sloppy Chinese acme screw. It is not in the basic setup as it is not required and sometimes not desireable.

Cool, thanks!!