I’ve had my nomad for just under 2 weeks now. I bought it because a coworker wanted to make high quality dice for D&D. Well I got the first set made up and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with this little mill. My day job is a cnc programmer/set up guy so I was a bit skeptical if the performance would be even halfway decent to what im used to. Outside of wanting some more torque and more rigidity it rocks. I was pretty impressed with the material removal rate i could get in brass as well. (.275" DOC, .007" WOC 30 IPM with adaptive clearing, 1/8" 3 fl helical solutions endmill). I just made a fixture plate to run all 7 at once as we have orders coming in already, so the next test is going to be reliability. Here are some pictures throughout the process.
That’s even more impressive! Even though I can’t begin to comprehend how you figured out to do all that with the multi-sides, it opens up a lot of ability I can see now with this machine…
The good ol’ magic of super glue lol, I wanted to low profile clamps (miteebites) for the raw stock but a vacuum fixture wouldnt be good enough on op2 so I decided to stick with super glue for it all. Some acetone cleans it all off nicely.
Thanks! It’s what I do for a living and I’ve been doing it for a long while now, so just time and trial and error on larger machines lol. I’d like to maybe start documenting my work on this machine so others can see that it is truly a small but capable full 3 axis vertical machining center and not just a “router”
I will note that for those of us who don’t do this for a living, with the attendant mentoring/training, there are entire books dedicated to the problem of workholding and fixtures. Picked up a copy of Jigs and Fixtures: a reference book showing many types of jigs by Colvin and Haas and agree that it’s rightly described as a classic.
Much appreciated! The engraving is actually just a simple 2d countour that ramps down with a .02 endmill. I just visually set zero on one of the die points lol. I’m impressed with the spindle runout, its more than good enough for small endmills in metals
Good to know. I was referring to the process where it must be rotate the dies in the jig, run one set of number engraving, rotate the dies again, run another set of number engraving, etc, etc, etc until you have numbers on all faces. Have to say it has my mind working to figure out how to make it most efficient.
I really wanted a pocketnc just for that reason lol. Currently I just throw it in the low pro vise one side at a time. By far the least effecient operation of the whole process -.-
Griff
(Well crap, my hypometric precursor device is blown…)
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Please. That would be tremendously helpful. We’ve all learned/been inspired by Vince Fabs work. Anything you’d like to contribute would double our pleasure. Mahe sure you post in Gallery so it won’t auto close.
How do you so the multi-sided dice and get nice finishes on the sides? I imagine you are 3D contouring around it and mill it with small stepdowns to get a nice surface finish?
I’m roughing with an adaptive then finishing the radius’ with a scallop and parallell passing the sides. I use a .02" corner radius endmill so i can rough and finish all with one tool
Wow, nice! My brother was interested in me making him a set of dice and yours look really nice. What diameter endmill are you using with the 0.02in radius? 1/8"?
Yea 1/8 3fl bull nose from helical solutions. They are radially ground so theres a very small section of the cutting edge that isnt relieved. It creates a small amount of rubbing that stabilizes the cut and negates a VERY large amount of chatter. You need to use about 1.5x the diameter to get the full effect. Its all I use in non ferrous metals at work and on the nomad