It was a good weekend. I'm getting better at F360, I used to get very frustrated with it, I can now do the basic stuff pretty quickly from CAD to CAM so that's encouraging. I loaded my 5 most used tools into the TTS collet chucks created a tool library in F360 as well as in LinuxCNC.
This height gauge had about 8thou error in repeatability due to a wobbly base, after sanding it I got it down to 1.5thou.
I then realized I needed a collet rack. No worries, let's design it in F360 real quick and let's test the tool changes for the first time on a real part so this will be a single gcode file with different operations and different tools. I also want the endmill to plunge where the center drill drilled the holes. So far so good.
Now, let's go cut it...well, except I don't have any suitable stock material. Wait, I have this set of 1/8" aluminum toe alignment-setting plates left over from my racing days back in the early 2000s...time to sacrifice, err recycle them. So I rough cut one with the plasma. Mounted it on a 1/4" plywood spoil board (I really need a better spoil board), said a prayer or two and hit the go button
The machine asked for Tool 4, the center drill, popped it in, it set the correct offsets and made perfect starting holes. It then moved back up to z0 and asked for the next tool (the roughing end mill), popped it in and hit ok...it read the correct offsets and started plunging. Pretty quickly though I realized something was wrong because it plunged hard and black dust came out of the hole. Oh ****, that's the mill table it's roughing out! ****!!! I hit the Esc key, manually jogged the z axis up...yep, I definitely milled my mill!
But how? wrong tool offset? nope. Ah, what a dummy! I input -0.7" in for stock bottom in CAM instead of -0.07...that's going to leave a mark!
After that it was all good, actually just about perfect how it all worked out. The engraving toolpath however, left me a little unhappy because it was trying to draw these tiny hair-lines that don't show up in the design, it was mostly cutting air (almost like trying to engrave a 3D part) so it was wasting time. I'll have to look into it a bit more or try to find a better way to engrave. Which btw I used a 1/16th carbide ball endmill for (running at 4 ipm at .005" DOC). Engraving toolpath did require that I classify it as a chamfer bit (i used 60deg so it doesn't try to plunge into the valleys) or else it wouldn't generate the toolpath. I really need to find single line text fonts for these simple engraving needs.
I spent pretty much all day in the garage cutting out this part, something i could've ordered for $20 on ebay I'm sure with a single mouse click but it was satisfying to see it come out as I'd envisioned it.
