CNC plate: More holes?

[jepho]

I changed my SM1 bed and its clamps. I am happy now. Drilling holes was made easier by having a pillar drill and tapping by hand, providing you use some cutting fluid is not difficult, but it is time consuming. I bought a bar of T6 6063 aluminium for the clamps and a sheet of T6 6061 aluminium that was 4mm thick. It replicates the existing bed. The use of a hacksaw and file and the determination to make a difference to the original SM1 bed was all that was required.

Modifying the SM1 Table and its Clamp System

I have now completed the bed and clamp modifications for my SM1. My original feeling was that it was sometimes quite awkward to hold items to the bed when trying to use the CNC milling functions for SM1. One limitation that I ran into very quickly was the 90mm square workpiece limitation. I assumed that this was partly due to the travel of the head and the length of the clamps that were supplied with SM1. The illustration which follows shows the clamps which were quite long and quite soft and th…

I thought the CNC process could do with flat clamps so I made a jig that incorporated them and it works really well. The dimensions of the jig are 150 x 200mm, which is larger than the 130mm square of the supplied table but keeping the enclosure door open and placing the fixings at one end permits enough travel for the module to traverse the centre of the jig.

Started making my flat clamp jig for cube carving

I was using the laser to etch 40mm cubes with the letters of the alphabet and everything was fine. I bulk ordered some cubes and was surprised to find that the laser worked well but could not make any impression on the wood where the hard annular ring wood was. The mock-up image shows an example of the end grain that was causing the laser not to burn the wood. The darker wood is the hard compressed ring of the tree. This was disappointing because I did not want to have edge burn or smoke stainin…