A Close Shave

So armed with a new design, It was back to the makerspace. Results were mixed to say the least.

In order to not once more find that I had designed something that could actually not be built, I decided to mill a prototype out of plywood. I had a hunch that is might not work, and boy was I right!

Promising start…

Everything worked out really well until the final finishing passes when then forces from the milling simply lifted the pieces out from their frames and shredded them to splinters.

But no joy….

In the mean time, I tried to mill one of the motor fastening pieces in aluminium. The mister was broken so I used som manual compressed air and alcohol from a squirt bottle. It turns out that that is not nearly as good as having a fine mist of alcohol and air continuously flowing. Twice I had to pause and remove gummy aluminium from the flutes of my mill, but nothing broke at the piece came out as perfectly beautiful as I had hoped. 😀

In order to handle the tolerances, I actually told Fusion that my end mill was 0.1mm smaller than it really was. That worked well as a hack.

I made one mistake, though, and that was forgetting that my ball bearings are 7mm wide and not 8. But fortunately I can fix that by simply removing 1mm off the top of the piece next time.