Senior Week 24

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first three days of this week were spent finishing up the Bike Holder for Metal Fab. I think it turned out pretty good.

It fits the pipe perfectly and the Metal Fab teachers were quite impressed with it. We didn’t have bolts long enough for it, but Metal Fab should be able to buy some easily enough.

With the Bike Holder done, I had nothing to do. However, Ben Wirz was using the Tormach and noted how the ATC is missing a couple parts. Right now, our “12-pocket” ATC only holds 10 tools because we’re missing some parts for it. We could buy them, and while price isn’t really a concern, I looked and they were $47 each!

These parts are required to hold the tools in each ATC pocket, and while we probably could have 3D printed them, they’d most likely break and drop a tool eventually. We could easily enough mill them ourselves so that’s what I set out to do.

I did most of the CAM for it on Wednesday, and started milling the first one on Thursday. It so far looks good, but I still need to do the second setup to see if the part will actually work.

Senior Week 23

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I started working on a project from Metal Fab to make a clamp to hold some bike parts. The unique thing about this project is that it involves milling a pocket that is 3" deep. This is deeper than any of our normal tooling can reach. Luckily, we do have a tool that can reach that far. Mr. L had barely used it, so I had to learned all about it and test it out to see what its limits are.

This tool is known as a “Shearhog” and is a roughing tool specifically for aluminum.

After quite a bit of testing, I got some feeds and speed that appear to work well with the tool. I’ve got it cutting 1.2in^3 of aluminum per minute, which is quite fast. I ended up cutting through two fairly large pieces of stock finding the right settings to use, but I hope we’ll be able to make good use of this tool in the future.

Once I’d learned how to use the Shearhog, I could get started on actually manufacturing the part. I needed to start with facing down the stock to the correct size to get its size in line with what I have in CAM, and to get the sides flat and square.

The shearhog can chew through quite a lot of material and makes a big mess of the Tormach, which I needed to clean up.

I didn’t have time to do all the faces, but so far I’ve faced three of the six sides I’ll need to do.

Bike Holder on Aaron BenDaniel's Blog

Senior Week 24

Senior Week 23