It was cool to watch the Tormach hog this out of a block of aluminum bar stock.
A PCB will bolt onto this. Some parts will be on the bottom, and will get hot, so we'll use gap-pads or thermally conductive putty to conduct the heat down to the block, which will itself get cooled somehow. Some of the cutouts are clearances for the pins of thru-hole parts.
This was hard to photograph; the shiny features mess with my camera's autofocus.
Yikes, those are some seriously coarse cuts. You can break tools that way, even in 6061 Al--I hope the safety shield was in place while people were around.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
why you think so? the surface finish doesn't look great but looks can cheat
It was cool to watch the Tormach hog this out of a block of aluminum bar stock.
A PCB will bolt onto this. Some parts will be on the bottom, and will get hot, so we'll use gap-pads or thermally conductive putty to conduct the heat down to the block, which will itself get cooled somehow. Some of the cutouts are clearances for the pins of thru-hole parts.
This was hard to photograph; the shiny features mess with my camera's autofocus.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
My old old Olympus and fairly new Canon digital cameras both have focus lock - press the shutter release down halfway and the camera does its autofocus and then holds that until you either release the button or press all the way to take the picture. For something like your plate, put a sheet of paper with some kind of target drawn on it with good contrast (a business card would probably work), position the camera and push the button halfway so it focuses on the target and holds that, remove the paper and take the picture (all without moving the camera). Easiest with either a tripod or a helper :-).
-- Regards, Carl Ijames
It's smooth and beautiful in real life. It's just hard to photograph.
Yea, looks like different radiuses were used, the machinists just used
2 tools to make the cuts. Looks like it took a long time to do.Cheers
There were three end mills, two drills, and a chamfer used. A 1/4 inch mill did the roughing, and a couple of smaller ones did the fine stuff. Small variations in cut depth are obvious in the photo but barely visible in the flesh. They don't matter.
Time on the Tormach, with manual tool changes, was about 20 minutes. In production, if that ever happens, we will have an outside shop make them, and time on a serious mill would be a lot less.
On Mar 8, 2018, John Larkin wrote (in article):
Try a light tent. And the focus-lock trick others have mentioned.
Joe Gwinn
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