Avid CNC Ep6: Rotary 4th Axis

Chase Customer Creations is sponsored by Bits and Bits. Use the code JBates to save 10% off your next router bit or CNC bit purchase at bitsbits.com. I got this Avid CNC machine about three, four years ago, something like that. And it's kind of an odd size. I picked out a four foot by 10 foot system because I didn't think I would use anything wider than four feet. Still haven't to this day, so that was a good decision. But I did want to go longer than a typical eight foot because I had some other ideas. I wanted to work on the middle of the machine. I wanted to work on the front of the machine and on the back of the machine. The middle of the machine is obviously where the majority of the magic happens. This is the horizontal table and minimum of four foot by eight foot for sheet goods and whatnot. Screw it down at the corners because there is no vacuum table. Super easy to do. Of course, you can go further in either direction to flatten longer stuff like a 10 foot slab. Very easy to do that as well. I put dog holes in here for very precise and easy locating. This horizontal table setup has been fantastic. Front of the machine is the most exciting to me and that's because I put a vertical table on here so you could mount stuff vertically and make joinery on the ends of your material. So it's almost a limitless joinery machine. There's a dog bone mortise and tenon. That's pretty fun, right? Well, tenon, not mortise and tenon. And then we have a keyhole tenon. These are just little test pieces that I kept. Vertical table is something that I highly recommend on any CNC machine. If you have a CNC machine and you don't have a vertical table, try to pursue putting one on there, figuring out how it works with your machine. Being able to create joinery with CNC precision is just so much fun. Think about it. Basically, all of our furniture that we create has joinery. Making it this way, in my opinion, is just so much fun. The third area of the machine that I'm just now pursuing is this area right here. I've always left this open for the fourth axis attachment. Fourth axis rotary attachment for this particular machine. I already put the support blocks in place. I already built the rotary. Now I just need to install it and calibrate it. One of the cool things about this rotary, which goes back to the fact that these whole Avid machines are modular and you can do a lot of stuff with them as far as the setup. You can mount this frame inside the frame or on top of the frame. You can mount this rotary frame inside the machine frame or on top of the machine frame along the X direction or the Y direction. I chose to go with the X direction inside the frame. There's pros and cons to both setups or all the different setups, but for me, this is the one that makes the most sense. There's lots of documentation on calibrating this, so I won't go into specifics of how to do it, but it's a very interesting process because not only do we have to calibrate this way so that we're parallel with the X travel left and right, but we also have to calibrate up and down so that we are once again parallel with the X travel this way, assuming that Z never changes. So all that's done and it's very helpful and easy with the normal touch-off plate as well as a little accessory that goes inside the chuck. All of that's done, so now we can actually cut something. Now, one of the things that I really recommend when you're dealing with something new, some type of new hardware, technology, whatever, is yes, of course, do your research and try and figure out as much as you can via research, but also try and get into a thought process to try and figure it out on your own. I tell that to my daughter all the time. Figure it out. It's really powerful if you can figure stuff out on your own. And then, of course, research and learn as much as you can. So I have already tinkered with this in VCarve and I think I have the process set up to do a basic cylinder and then cut some V-groove points into that cylinder for something like a handle on a pool cue. You typically see four points, eight points, six points, whatever. You see points inside the handle of a pool cue and I'm going to test a few things while trying to just mock up something without any actual dimensions and see what it looks like. You obviously do not need to go through the milling process to make something square four sides to put it on a lathe to just turn it into a cylinder, but I went ahead and did that process so that I could use the router table and cut some shallow rabbets along the edge that will go into the chuck. And what I'm left with is these four rabbets right here that I think might help repeatability when it comes to positioning these inside the chuck. I don't know how often I will be putting stuff in and out of this setup here. However, it doesn't hurt to experiment right off the bat. So these little rabbets go into the jaws of the chuck and that should help me with repeatability as far as taking this off and putting it back on if I need to go that route. So testing this technique as well as everything else that I've got going on. First cut is, I'll say, a success, but there's a little bit there to wrap my head around, no pun intended. So this was way aggressive. What I did is I measured the outside to outside of the square blank, two inch square blank, and wasn't thinking of that being from the center of the square to the center of the square as far as the flat faces. And then if you go diagonal to diagonal, that's actually the true diameter you should be starting with, which is much more than two inches. So stress that bit a little bit. Cut quality is not that great. That's okay. I understand now. So a little bit of a learning experience there. I think my measurements were pretty darn good. Oh, one other thing. So in VCarve, what's really cool is you can always specify your start and stop location. Meaning if you're just batching out a bunch of stuff right here in the flat area, you can set it to start and stop, let's just say, where it is right now. That way when you go to work on it or swap out the material, it's out of your way. You specified a start and stop location. It gets out of the way. And I thought I was doing that, but I'm still in the flat plane mentality because I specified an X value of one, which is about right. It's about one inch away from where I wanted to start. And then a Y value of negative three. And I'm thinking, well, negative three goes this way. So it should be back here when it stops. Well, the whole point of the rotary or the way that the rotary works is you're wrapping the Y direction around the A axis, if that makes sense. So if you need to move three inches in the Y direction, it's actually going to spin this by three inches, if that makes sense. So the start and stop location is actually right where it's at now and not back here. So it's just a few different things to think about, I guess you could say. I'm going to load up another cut with this to go just a tiny amount more and see if we can't clean this surface up just for the sake of cleaning up the surface. I'm still experimenting here. Still kind of a rough surface, but of course, this is routing perpendicular to the grain. So for further experimentation, I'm going to go down just a little bit more and I'll change my raster cut from along the Y direction to along the X direction. So now the A axis, which is the rotary, should travel the least amount and we should be going back and forth along the X back and forth, back and forth as it incrementally moves with every single pass. That should result in a much smoother surface because we're going with the grain. As expected, yeah, that's the better surface finish. So definitely, definitely a smoother surface finish going in the X direction, which is what you would expect. However, you also have to take into consideration that the bottom of the router bit here is a flat plane. So a flat plane is never going to make things absolutely perfectly smooth if you are only going parallel to the cylinder here. You'll instead have a bunch of small facets, I guess that's the right word, facets, little flats based upon your step over in the settings in VCarve. That being said, I can't feel any facets at all. Feels like a smooth dowel. So that's a win. Let's do some VCarving to make some points in here. Now, as far as how I'm creating this next toolpath, I'm just using a straight line in VCarve and using the fluting toolpath. I believe it's going to start on this side and it goes down to 100% depth over here, starting at zero, going down, and here I think I have the depth set to a quarter inch or something like that. But I'm using a 90 degree v-bit, that way once it's cut, I can glue in a 90 degree square on edge and round that over once again and we should be left with some actual points. So this is not the greatest wood to actually see what's going on here. That's a decent view. Oh, good shadow. So we've got a nice long point on there and this is not the correct dimensions for a pool cue, it's just an experiment, right? So I have these grooves cut already to accept a 90 degree contrasting wood. I will use probably walnut and glue these in place, let it sit overnight, put it back on the lathe, the CNC, and have it smoothed up to see what it looks like, right? This is not the appropriate size for a pool cue, this is just an experiment, but it's exciting nonetheless. This is really cool. One thing to note is, and I don't know how well it's going to show up on camera, the cut quality isn't the best. I've got fuzzies on one side and perfectly smooth on the other and that's because one side is a conventional cut and the other side is a climb cut due to the rotation of the bit and the climb cut, the climb side, is fuzzy. So to solve that, you get a different style of v-bit. So this v-bit cuts in the vertical orientation, like so. The correct v-bit for this application is one of those that has, uh, it's on the side, so it spins around and the v-profile is on the side and your attack angle, instead of on the top, would be on the side. Now, I don't know the process for implementing that on this particular setup. I'm sure we could figure something out. Oh, so cool. This is just so exciting for me. Um, anywho, I'm gonna glue in some walnut and we'll pick up tomorrow, clean it up, and see what it looks like. All right, lots to reflect upon with this successful experiment and this distraction of a baby face. Anyway, uh, uh, after sanding it, I threw some shellac on it just for contrast. And the inspiration, I think I probably already said it for this little experiment, was a pull cue handle. Not a handle. Handle would be down here. This would be a forearm or a foregrip, forearm. Anyway, these points turned out better than I thought, actually. I thought because I was going vertically with the v-bit that I probably wouldn't get that good of a pocket, I guess you could say. And it turned out great, actually. It turned out much better than what I expected. However, on the tailstock side is where it was plunging down. I was hoping that wouldn't happen. I was hoping it would just go start up here and go down, lift up, start down here, go down, lift up. That way it didn't have that aggressive force as it plunged over here because with that force plunging, the bit is only going to be cutting primarily on this side because we've already cleared out material right there, right? So if it's only cutting on one side, then you're going to put lateral force onto that side of the stock. And I think that may have pushed it off just slightly on the tailstock side. And the reason I say that is because according to my calibration of the machine, I got it within four thousandths of an inch tailstock to the chuck. And the instructions say five thousandths of an inch or less along that whole travel. So I think I got it dialed in plenty good enough. But if you look at this end right here where the tailstock was, you'll see that the vertical lines, the vertical line here and here are parallel. They're not collinear. Same on the other side. And then the horizontal line is the same thing. They're parallel. They're not collinear. There's a slight twist to these points. These points, if you draw a line in between them, they're off by just a tiny amount. So I think I think that was from a bit plunging and then just inducing just ever so slight amount of pull onto the tailstock. I don't know. Maybe maybe my calibration is off. But anyway, on the outside, it looks perfect. That's a very, very, very minor flaw that I would observe there. The points themselves are all nice and pointy. They're nice and crisp points. So that's a good quality cut there. I figured out all of this by just tinkering on V-Carve, not watching any tutorials. So that's that's really good, too. I'm just excited to have this fourth axis installed in the machine so I can do some pool cue stuff, but also, you know, cabrio legs, decorative type of ball and claw feet type stuff. I know. I know it's not hand tools, carve, blah, blah, blah. I don't care. So, yeah, the fourth axis is offering a lot of possibilities and it's just exciting for me. That's it for this video. Just an experiment after the installation. You guys take care. Have a great day and I'll talk to you in the next video.