RE: [TCML] Geek Group Lab Tour - Jan 2010

["Chris Boden" <cboden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You're exactly correct. The downside however is the speed our things work
at. Traditional milling is done with a spindle speed of about 4,000RPM as an
absolute max (and that's screaming fast, try it sometime), and feeds in the
dozen IPM range perhaps.

Our SR-100 rocks out at 24,000RPM with a max speed of 1500IPM, making it
easy to destroy tooling at a staggeringly fast rate (and with half-thou
precision no less). Never before have I been able to destroy equipment so
quickly, easily, and efficiently. Finding *RECENT* data on optimized chip
loading for cutting G-10 is beyond difficult since there's so few people who
do it seriously and they've been doing it the same way for 50 years. Any
Feed-Speed data over 5 years old is useless with today's tooling. The
technology is so radically different it'll scare the hell out of you the
first time you see one of these guys hog into something. The physics behind
it is incredible, they're manipulating the heat so that it all goes into the
chips (instead of the tool or the part). This allows for MUCH higher
chiploads than I'd have ever imagined, and in turn you're seeing
rooster-tails of chips rocketing out of machines and material removal at
rates that would have turned endmills incandescent a few years ago.

If I only wanted to run off a bolt-circle and cutout for one or two parts I
wouldn't mind burning through a couple cheap $20 HSS endmills. But running
parts 100 at a time, well, that gets expensive in a hurry. This is
especially true when I'm playing with the big toys, we have a SINGLE ENDMILL
sitting on the shelf that came with a $1500 pricetag.

And that's without the bloody inserts!

A local machine shop just donated a 6" shell mill with a box of nifty
diamond inserts. They were using diamond inserts in this to face high silica
aluminum and were getting only 400 parts from a set. It takes a dozen to
load the cutter, and they're only 2 face (so you can only flip them once).
It was costing him just over a grand every time he swapped them out, and he
was running 600 parts a day, for weeks on end.

I'm looking at getting into a lot of UHMW (which machines like butter but
it's fussy), Copper (which *sucks* because it galls and tears so bad),
Aluminum (cake), G-10 (nightmare), and Tungsten (*twitch*) to make serious
Tesla goodies for the coiling crowd. The only thing we can't do yet is
spinning for toroids, but I *can* make sectional toroids in any size
imaginable, so long as it's in pieces. We're experimenting with that
currently (for foamcore stuff) and I'm getting a Ring Roll Bender soon that
will let us make them in the style used on Electrum in large scales. And
large scale toroids have been a problem for coilers in the Real World for as
long as I've been around. Sure, the Hollywood coilers can get the giant spun
ones, but they work with the Entertainment Industry, where the money flows
with no oversight, logic, or common sense. The rest of us have to get
creative.

We've got a lot of fun things happening over here with the new shop coming
together, and anyone is welcome to come for a tour. Today's new fun, we just
got a serious DeWalt planer in and *wow* is that a fun time. :) Sure beats
facing everything in the milling machine! :)

And for today's viewing pleasure, lasers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OupSWz9TfcY

Have fun guys!


The Geek Group 
National Science Center
Christopher A. Boden
President / Founder
www.thegeekgroup.org
Because the Geek shall inherit the Earth!




-----Original Message-----
From: tesla-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:tesla-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of jimlux
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2010 7:15 PM
To: Tesla Coil Mailing List
Subject: Re: [TCML] Geek Group Lab Tour - Jan 2010

Chris Boden wrote:
> Yes, though you'll have to wait until I have tooling for that (a few weeks
> if all goes well). Cutting G-10 is hell on tools. We're working with our
> tooling supplier on finding a workable solution to do this in production
> quantities. Email me at info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and we'll get you sorted
out.
> 
> 

The two choices I've used (and seen) that seem to work are:
1) diamond grit
2) standard tool steel, and just resharpen a lot

Either way, it's getting rid of the dust that's important, because it is 
really, really hard on the machine ways, lead screws, etc.and you'll 
destroy the precision.

In PC board mfr they use carbide for punches, for instance.
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