Several educated decisions must be made before making a purchase in the hopes of minimizing lost money or time. Today, to keep the ball rolling on one of my airsoft projects I had to make a quick decision about a ball-end mill purchase. As I was modeling my CAM file for the part, I had to choose between a 3/16" diameter or 1/4" diameter. I picked 3/16" because I can interpolate curves with the 3/16" that should be near to similar geometry of the 1/4" ball end mill. A quick run over to Hall tool, and I got the tools. I also purchased a VERY small double sided endmill (1/16"), for some detailed work.
I also received the Toroid Transformer the mail from Antek Inc. It looks like in good condition to me. It is a surprisingly heavy piece of equipment. I need to locate 1 more medium sized capacitor to run in parallel, and we will have all the components for our powersupply. If I can get all these things to Grant, we should be able to fabricate, and finish off the control board. Basically - we will be able to test the brains of the CNC machine. This will let us also test and configure the stepper motors. I'm sure if we can get the board, and the steppers running, the project will quickly accelerate.
There's always a defining moment in a project, where you find out if it is inevitably going to work. I believe we have one coming of those moments coming up with the power supply, control board, and steppers. I mean if we get that done, we essentially need to attach a few more mechanical components, ballscrews, THK rails, and spindle and we have ourselves a CNC machine!
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