ooo baby
On Tuesday at Splatspace I made an attempt at a “real” board milling. Once more I had Z axis issues, AND the tubing that is used to couple the motor to the spindle shaft came loose. BAH.
After a quick Thanksgiving trip I made some adjustments: loctited the Z axis coupler to the stepper shaft, and installed a new piece of tubing on the spindle shaft. Fired it up and… success! Brief video:
And a pic of the final product:
Observations:
1. One flute on this 4-flute 1/64″ endmill is chipped, so things might get a little smoother. I’m shopping around for carbide mill prices.
2. No missing traces, no bridges! Woot!
3. Z axis paranoia led me to make it too deep: .01″ instead of .005. I will try .005 next time.
4. Lord, this thing is sloooow. I don’t want to bump the feed up any higher (although with a shallower cut that might be okay). It took an hour to do this board, mostly due to inefficiently hopping around from point to point. Carr supposedly has an optimized cad-opt.py; this may reduce the time. I will try that next.
5. I didn’t cut it out using the mill.
6. I really need a USB microscope; that pic is kind of lame.
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