Recent Articles
figNoggle Design's Website Going High-Definition HD In 720P!
8x12 Mini Lathe Timing Pulley Lubrication and Replacement Belt Size
Meister BC10M 3-Axis Glass Scale DRO Installed On Rong-Fu 45 Benchtop Mill - The Goods
Rong-Fu 45 Benchtop Mill Spindle Wrench Prototype
Enco RF45 Clone First Run Thoughts
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Hi everyone-
We are going high-definition aka HD.
From now on, new posts with pictures and accompanying video will be (hopefully) in better quality all-around. Videos will no longer be clipped at 15 seconds and in 4:3 format. New videos will be in 16:9 with longer clips. Of course, we’ll need to preserve bandwidth, so the videos while being shot in 720p will be converted to a lower format for web-streaming.
read more..Our stock 8×12 minilathe belt was fraying around the edges and was getting close to shredding apart. Instead of taking further chances on its useful life without a replacement, we looked at the various catalogs for a suitable replacement v-belt. The closest imperial belt (since MSCDirect didn’t have metric belts) was a 3L size with a 290 length. Once we installed it, we found it to be rather tight. We went ahead and posted a message on the minilathe Yahoo! group:
read more..We’ve been itching to write-up something on these glass-scale DRO systems that are available from just about any and every vendor. We happened to buy ours from an eBay vendor. More on that later.
Here’s our story…
read more..If you have a benchtop mill of the Rong-Fu or clone variety – whether it’s a belt drive or gear drive – you’ll find that the lack of a spindle wrench makes torquing down tooling difficult.
We’ve prototyped a spindle wrench on our CNC mill out of a 2” wide 3/8” thick aluminum extrusion. Turns out that you can simply make this by drilling a through hole (or boring one out in the center) and then making three slots for the “fingers”). But after drafting up the sketch in a program like Autodesk Inventor, PTC ProEngineer Wildfire 3.0, Solidworks, or a host of other programs and then using a program like Mastercam to generate the G-Code, it took a few minutes to crank out the following part:
Here’s the raw stock being CNC milled:
After installing a 220V outlet and wiring up the mill, we powered it on and put it through some quick operations. Here are our thoughts…
1. It’s quieter than we had originally anticipated. In fact, it’s quieter than the X3 (and especially the X2 without the belt drive conversion). There is a noticeable hum as the gears mesh, but that’s about it.
2. The Forward/Off/Reverse switch while excelling in its simplicity,
read more..After watching the sales flyers, we found the Enco version of the Rong-Fu 45 mill/drill on sale.
Read more about this nicely-sized benchtop mill/drill. Much larger than the X3 mill, this makes for a very nice homeshop cnc conversion candidate.
read more..We fired up the X3 mill and put some different cutting tools to work ranging from the 2 and 4-flute endmills to radius cutters and finally face mills.
We ran into an interesting interference issue.
On the X2 mill, the spindle lock is located on top of the head. On the RF-40 clone mill, there is no spindle lock; you just grab the large pulley to “lock it”.
On the X3 mill, since it has a quill, there’s no place atop the head to install a locking mechanism:
We recently purchased a new Grizzly G0463 version of the Sieg X3 Small Mill.
It was a pleasant experience so far and we’re excited about putting this version of the mill to work (and finally releasing the X3 plans and kits later in the year).
Read our first thoughts in the pictorial.
The Homann Designs’ DigiSpeed-XL and CandCNC Mini-I/O boards have finally been hooked up together and tested under Mach3 using PWM. Pretty cool so far!
It’s up and running!
The CNC 8×12/14 Lathe project has been completed in its prototype stage. It maintains manual function as well as CNC without changing anything. There are a few things left to work out before we offer the plans (and then the kits).
We’re still getting familiar with Mach3 Turn (it’s been quite buggy in many respects unlike Mach3 Mill). It also took some getting used to using the thread wizard that came packaged with it.
read more..