So many hours of Youtubing later ( Why is a 3-flute better than a 4-flute? What are Feeds&Speeds? ) and one surprisingly expensive order of material and end mills I am finally ready to go to to Stockholm Makerspace and learn how to actually mill out a part on the Terco CNC there.

I chose Delrin to get started since if is such a forgiving material. It is oily and does not really require any lubrication. It is soft enough that it will not break my expensive end-mills.

So the Delrin experiment went well! My parts were so thin and Delrin so soft that the pieces got deformed by the vice, but over-all it worked as expected. Time to graduate to Aluminium!

What do you know? A beauty, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, the tolerances were off and the bearing didn’t fit the first time, but that was an easy fix.

Also, I milled two pieces, but learned about peck drilling the hard way. If you try to drill a 2.5mm hole 25mm deep in one go you break your drill…. So now I know. For those who do not know, peck drilling means that you drill a few mm at the time and then pull the drill out to clear out all of the removed material and reapply alchohol mist for lubrication before going down again.

Does not mean that it will work in real life. So I had made sure to leave enough room for the screw-heads needed to assemble the piece. I also had a plan how to be able to reach with tools to be able to actually fasten the screws. All except two…

So it is back to the drawing board……

So I thought I had this milling thing under control…. Not so much. Today everything went wrong.

First I forgot that my stock aluminium piece I was using today was 10mm wider than I have modeled it in Fusion. Que my 4mm endmill digging in with full engagement into the piece instead of shaving off about 1mm at the time from the edges and promptly breaking off.

Went to the shelf of endmills to purchase and found that there is one last 4mm carbide endmill. Mounting in in the machine I slip with the wrenches. That was apparently enough to break the brittle carbide mill clean off.

So all of the previous posts were written in one go. So why did I decide to document my process just now?

Well, because I just saw this clip by Bernadett Banner, a costume historian whose video blog I found recently and which very much suits my personality. Yes, historical dressmaking and programming machines to cut metal into pieces that will become a semi-autonomous robot. This is 2019, and I don’t need to limit myself.

So having spent the last 5 years being a full-time parent (That is, 2 years home as an actual full time parent and the rest having a full time job but other than that focusing completely on my kids) it was time to get a hobby.

Having spent far too much time in the virtual world of code, I miss the smell of burnt electronics and the feel of a newly milled aluminium edge I decided to build something electro-mechanical. The Rhex robot looks like a beautifully simple design.