Thursday, December 19, 2013

scanner: "lightening" the handle brackets










For some strange reason, I had never used the boring head that I had gotten when Eric and I moved the mighty Bridgeport from it's resting place in a Lake Villa basement and up to my Milwaukee studio. I figured it might be nice to bore some large holes in the handle brackets to lighten the look of the scanner visually. I did the first bracket on the Bridgeport to see if I liked it and then Aaron wrote some code, when he was in working for me yesterday, that we could use to profile the holes in the remaining three brackets that I had cut out. I've been getting in the habit of zeroing (placing WCC) work like this off the center of the stock so it makes it easy to put features in existing parts that have already been cut out or that I have made manually (which was the case here). I clamped these in my vise and used a set of parallel blocks to raise the bracket up so we don't have to worry about spoiling the vise. I use a center drill to center and zero the mill off of my indicator mark and then I change out to my endmill and let it rip. The three brackets took just a few minutes to "lighten" and we were on to bigger and better things. This is an example of what I posted earlier. Do some manual work first and then let the Tormach save you some time.





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