More CNC playtime...

[Wicked_S10]

I spent some time screwing with my CNC mill today. I got the undersize thing figured out. Turned out to be really simple, I didn't have the software set up correctly. I had to increase the length of the direction pulse.

I Engraved an O/S Phoenix Gold logo in aluminum, and in plexi. I didn't have any proper engraving cutters, so I just gave it a shot with an old drill. Came out pretty good, the plexi was just a piece of scrap, but I think I am going to engrave some in thicker plexi and side light them with LED's for a nice touch in my Bronco install.

Here are the pictures:

http://www.rollmeover.com/bronco_fab/amps/amps005.jpg

http://www.rollmeover.com/bronco_fab/amps/amps008.jpg

http://www.rollmeover.com/bronco_fab/amps/amps009.jpg

And here is a link to a crappy video of it cutting the plexi. I have got to remember to take the camcorder to the shop one of these days. Shooting video with a digital camera sucks.

Clicky (http://www.rollmeover.com/bronco_fab/amps/video/PG_logo_plexi.wmv)

Later,
Jason

[300sniper]

how did you come up with the code for that? there are a few things i want to engrave but am having trouble tracing them with cad. i have turbo cad and can't figure it out to save my life. i can trace the jpeg image but it turns out like crap.

i have been using a 1/4" 90* spot drill to do engraving.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v654/300sniper/cnc/300sniperengravingsmall.jpg

[Wicked_S10]

There are a lot of raster to vector image conversion softwares out there right now. It will make your life much easier. See bellow for how I done it.

I use Acad 2006. I pulled the logo from a .pdf of a M100 manual scan. Pretty low quality, but it was the logo I was looking for. I re-sampled it to an ungodly large size, and sharpened the edges in photoshop. I then converted it to a black and white image. Next I used the demo version of Magic Tracer 2.0 to vectorize the image. Pretty much follow the MT2.0 tutorials and it will do well. The more preperation to the image, the better, also let it thin the lines to 1, it will remove a lot of short polylines it generates. Re-scaled the vector image in Acad. Sent it to CamBam plus for post processing. CamBam allows me to set up the engraving operation and post G-code to the mill. The G-code for the 3x6 logo, and cut out was right around 9k lines long...

[jnutter]

Sweet. CNC is fun :)