3322 recently spent a large amount of resources getting our CNCRP pro 4’ x 4’ work holding up and running, and now it’s ready to machine tubes faster and better than we’ve ever been able to before!
Hopefully this will allow us to make parts as fast as we can CAD them, that’s the goal at least.
We Added a few pieces of 8020 in between the cross braces that make up the machine bed, and bolted a large 1/2" block of aluminum on top. We then made some small brackets to mount the vices.
Our vices came with unacceptable varies in height, so we had to shim them all the the same height (up to .025" off) and we swept a test indicator with the machine along the side of a pair of 2x1 extrusions clamped in the vices before tightening them down in order to ensure sufficient parallelism.
We actually had alot of issues with these vices, and had to re-machine internal components on all 4 vices, if your team does something like this in the future; buy nice vices, it’s worth it.
We are planing on having a pallet system for sheet metal and plastic with MDF sheets and locating pins, but that’s still a work in progress.
We use fusion 360 for CAD and CAM, and that workflow works out really well for us. When designs change the CAM automatically updates so iterations can be made with very little additional CAM work.
Good luck in 2020 from team 3322!