CNC Build, day 6 – cutting started

Since I’d done most of the prep last night, I was nearly ready to start right up this morning.

I had to move the rig out of the shop and onto the driveway (I am so done with sawdust everywhere), and I decided to add a spoilboard, as I worried that I might end up hitting a screw head or something. I had enough left over material from the Trixie rebuild to make a nice spoilboard, and I made sure to screw it down outside the cuttable area. I am going to have to be more careful with my holddowns once I can use the whole board…

I got rolling around 11:30 with the first boardful of cuts. Doing the drills first, then pockets, then cutouts, made for a nice accurate set of early holes. I ran into a problem during the cutout, though, and needed to take a break and rehome everything.

Quick aside.

I really need to get an auto homing system in place. If anything messes up mid cut I am in bad shape. Also, I need a more repeatable router mount. The current one allows too much flexure. Of course, there are several places where I get flexure in the current machine. But the router mount is the one that bothers me when something goes wrong.

Oh. And I will be using a larger router on the new machine. The little guy bogs down doing 1/4″ passes.

Back to the show.

I got things lined up again after the fail, and continued to cut out the parts. By the way, it failed because of the clearances around the parts, and my failure to leave any holding tabs. More stuff to learn.

I ended up losing 2 parts off of the board; nothing major, just need to be re-cut.
Even so, at the end of the day, I had a nice little pile of parts! 1 board down, 3 to go.