OT: Playing with a mill...

[yaddatrance]

We were at Ivan's shop this weekend and one of our goals is to mill out
SMT style PCBs. But first we needed to do some tests... we looked at
some CAD/CAM packages, but in true ghetto style, Josh figured out the
G-code specs, and he modified an old version of framelab to output G-code...


Our first victim was "reverse engineering" a simple motor speed control
unit... Josh took this pic with his digital camera and used photoshop to
reduce the colors...


Then it was off to framelab to import the image and autotrace it... You have
to delete the unwanted background images and then export to gerber.


We threw a 0.015" v-cutter bit into the mill and milled it out at F4 (4"/min)


Came out pretty well... Josh and Danno soldered it up and it worked perfectly.


Bouyed by the success, we milled some scrap PCB material with a 0.001"
bit just to see what it did! The two hikari logos are only 1/4" x 1/4" in size!


You can see some better detail when you hold it up at the right angle.
After some hasty searching, Ivan and Josh found the perfect victim...


A small knob for a potentiometer! Deep sexy!


It turned out so nice, we ran and milled out the anno on the FB16 case.

It's at this point when we realized that since the software we're using to
do this was framelab, we could do even funner things...


So I autotraced a cute image of some B-girl... and used our TTF font
renderer to write some text out underneath... and exported as gerber...


A few minutes later...


Success!!! You can see the details in http://photonlexicon.com/gallery/alb...1040486?full=1
You can also see where we wanted to be cheap and tried milling a PCB
using a broken bit... Didn't work so hot...

[liteglow]

that is so sweet

and here i`m sitting with some wood and spikes, to solder wires on and holt my component :roll: :roll:

I think i maybe need to uppgrade my stuff.....

[liteglow]

this is Off-Topic !
But this cuttind did give me a idea :twisted:

is there anything that the laser will burn easy into ?
Let say a paper that will be black if you burn it with the laser...
Then i can put a paper in front of my galvo, and focus the laser tight.
Then run the (girl .ILD) at a weeeery slow speed...
So after 1-2 hours the picture of that girl will be burned into the paper?

[yaddatrance]

If you can burn with your laser in the first place, then burning while steering
is no problem The easiest way would be to use larger mirrors
and set the focus so that the beam waist ends up on the target.

There's a guy here in LA who actually does laser bleaching of anno using a
simple 5W argon... This was the first I heard of such a low power laser
actually working for laser bleaching... The trick is apparently to go really
slowly... and I mean SLOOOOW... The bleach process takes so long
that it's imperceptible unless you wait... I don't know if I'm that patient...

Rule of thumb for continuous metal cutting is 100W/mm^2...
For paper/wood burning, you could easily get away with a focussed 300-
500mW, or trivially with no work at all at 1W...

When I have some free time, I'm hoping to convince Marconi to go into
collimated high power IR lasers...

[dave]

This thread has just reminded me about the old roland engraver i have sitting in at the workshop at work.. It all works fine, just the spindle motor needs to be replaced..

should have another hunt for a sutable motor.. 8)

[ArcDevilz]

How bout you try to incorporate a router motor into it? Not sure if that would save money or better yet call Roland. They always had great service for their music gear.