Optimum Optimill MH50V CNC conversion

Since the last update I've been finishing the tooling in preparation for the first CNC chips.

Bought some more ER32 collets and BT40 ER32 tool holders. Made some room for them in my little tool card which lives beside the mill and measured all the tool offsets so they could be entered into Probe Basic. I'm planning to mirror the tool information in FreeCAD later on.

 

 

 

Cutting the Kaizen style tool foam takes a while but the end result is worth it in my opinion.

 

 

 

The Omron encoder along with the belts and pulleys that I ordered have arrived but I haven't installed them yet.

 

Here are the first actual CNC chips done on the machine.



The part I'm milling is gonna be the belt and pulley cover for the Y-axis.

 

I've got everything up and running now. However when making the first parts it became clear that the belt covers I had neglected to make during the build process were a must so I've made covers for both the X and Y-axis belts now.

I used aluminum extrusions as the base for both covers with end plates made from billet aluminum.

Here is the Y-axis belt cover being made.





Here is how it looks installed on the machine.





 

The X-axis belt cover is designed a bit differently as one of the belt pulleys protrude a few millimeters below the servo mounting bracket.








Here is how it looks installed.





The next items on the "Todo list" now are to replace the spindle bearings and get jog controls in Probe Basic to play ball with my physical jog buttons. However first I'm planing to make a few batches of parts as I'm itching to do some proper CNC milling