Ok. Why do we need stronger motors??? I machined another part at 30krpm and 250 ipm and the shapeoko didn’t even break a sweat. Seems like it’s more limited with spindle power once ridgity upgrades are made.
Let’s have some fun…300ipm and 1000 accels??
Has anyone even gone this far with actual cutting??? Has anyone had belts skip due to cutting force?
On the one hand, it’s fundamentally the same: Arduino running Grbl, belt-driven hobby CNC, on the other hand, it’s remarkably more capable. The really wild thing is, the Nomad, which seems so tiny, has roughly the same working area (8" x 8" x 3") as the original SO1 (8" x 8" x 3.5").
For folks who are curious:
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Griff
(Well crap, my hypometric precursor device is blown…)
61
Well…just because…ha ha!
My only belt skip while cutting was in Z Solved that problem with Mr. Beavers HDZ design.
I’ve broken 1/4" mills in X and Y while learning to cut aluminum. Almost wish the belt would have skipped.
Lol, I’m all about upgrades too but its really interesting to me to see how far the stock one can go. 3/8s have been living fine at 3000sfm so that means I should be able to run a 1/4 at 45,000 rpm and 350ish ipm all things being equal.
Man, I crashed my gantry so hard last night! I had disabled the soft limits for some reason and setup the stock a little to close. Needless to say I blew up two wheels and slipped the X belt until the gantry slammed into a Y rail, but endmill was fine. 5 min later and back in business.
Good question. Although GWizard claims and appears to allow the selection of specific “Alloys” in each material “Family”, it uses a single undefined hardness value for all of the “Alloys” in the “Family”. It appears to use the hardness for 6061 T6 for all Aluminums.
Here’s what Bob Warfield “said” when I “asked” him about this in June “Gerald, here’s the thing–I’m not really here to teach everyone the detailed cutting physics of how G-Wizard works. Sorry, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. You can take my word that this approach works or not, but I’m just not interested in diving down into futher details.” Apparently he doesn’t think that it needs to be fixed.
Yeah, one thing I’d love to see is a physics-based CAM tool which tries to keep track of material removed and remaining to be removed and the effort needed for each revolution of the tool.
The material removal rate (MRR) is DOC (in) * WOC (in) * Feed (in/min). All speeds and feeds calculators (and anyone else) can accurately compute that. The effort required to achieve that MRR is the spindle power consumed during the cut. That’s a lot harder to calculate because it’s dependent on so many variables. It’s a lot easier (and likely more useful) to measure the spindle input power increase when cutting. In conjunction with spindle RPM, that can then be used to provide a pretty good estimate (via simple calculations) of the average force on the cutter and machine during the cut. If the machine’s torsional stiffness is known, the accuracy of the cut should also be calculable.
I’m not a GWizard user, do they allow the user to specify different types of aluminum but always use the same hardness, or do they just have one “aluminum” material when specifying the material you’re using?
It has lots of aluminum “Alloys” selectable, with as much as an order of magnitude in hardness variation, but only uses one hardness regardless of the “Alloy” selected. See.
They are absolutely not limited by design, but they work out such that 127oz/in isn’t enough to cause immediate damage to the belts, but if you get the machine running fast, and run it into something, you can (as Vince has) break some wheels or cause some other damage - that said, on my XL I haven’ t been able to get enough energy into anything to actually hurt anything in the past ~2 years.