This doesn't look right

From disaster, comes knowledge and good things.

Obviusly, by looking at the before (from last night) I was starting off with problems.
I had a dull end mill on my first pass. It landed in the garbage.
That's part of why I switched to the 17mm that I was hogging with.
You can also see where the bit grabbed and disaster occurred.

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This shows the grab best.
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I went with what, should have been, plan A. I drilled two holes through the length of the piece and then used the band saw to cut the bulk of the material out. It took all of about 4 minutes to cut with the band saw. I would have spent 4 hours or more hogging out that much metal.
I have to make a second one of these so I'll start with drilling holes.

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Another angle of the drill hole-saw cut. That's going to be a little bit of work to get the piece all flattened out but it's still preferable to hogging out the metal.

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And here I have the galley all cleaned up and ready for the next step. It cleaned up pretty nice, all things considered.

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And this is what that piece does. Eventually it will connect the rail slide from the bottom of my Z-axis rail to the plate that secures everything.
The width will have to be extremely precise, or I have to add shims. Most likely, I'll have to add shims.

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And just to assure you all that the right tool, for the right job, from this point further I will be using this.
I forgot that it came with the machine. It should suffice in keeping the mistake from happening again.


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You have to be careful using a mill in a drill chuck as the cutting forces tend to pull on the chuck and can yank it right off the taper and create all sorts of chaos. Tapers aren't so great at resisting pulling forces.
 
Glad to see you have an end mill holder @Inferno. That will serve you much better and preserve your end mills.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Well, I feel silly opening another thread for this piece I made so I'll just leave it here.

I realized that I screwed up in the order I should have done things.

I probably should have sized it on the outside before milling out the guts.

I needed to support the "legs" to mill them to size. I took a piece of scrap and milled it for a tight fit.

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As you can see it was held in place by the tight fit.

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The picture above vs the picture below. It shows the meat that was removed from both sides.

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I added the holes to secure the linear bearing. The bolts I recessed a little. They are on the very bottom so any clearance issues would be there. There's going to be plenty of clearance but I like it better this way.

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And then I added the threaded holes on the side for the vertical support I will be attaching later. I put 4 there as this is an important tie point for what will be the Z-axis. I could have cleaned up the top face you see here but it's not important and will never be seen. To clean it up proper would have reduced material and I'd rather keep the material there.

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And this is a before and after photo. Although this is a second piece, the finished piece started off exactly like this old dirty one.
This dirty piece will be a duplicate of the finished one here.

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So, I'm not totally inept with machines and tools and whatnot. I was just pushing the boundary a little. Any milling I do before my collets get here will have to be done with that one milling tool above. I can make it work.

Thanks for all the advice.
 
Thanks for the great photos. Looking forward to reading about how the end mill holder works out for you.
 
Mills and lathes are cheap it’s all the tooling that costs the money.
 
Seems like a collet would be cheaper
 
Seems like a collet would be cheaper
I bought collets and everything needed for them. Now, if only the Covid fallout would ease the frack up, I'd have time to get back to the stuff I enjoy.
 
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