Saturday, August 1, 2009

Making Scrap on Purpose

This is an odd tale.

A few years ago I bought a shelf full of junk at an auction. Included were a bunch of scrap parts from one of the screw machines. They look like stepped washers. About half of them had 7 holes drilled around the periphery. After tripping over the box for a year I was thinking of taking them to the scrap yard and then out of the blue Felice asked if she could use them for jewelry. So our Widget Earrings were born!
They sold pretty well and we finally ran out of the ones with the drilled holes. So it was my task to replicate what were essentially scrap parts out of the remaining undrilled ones.

I cross drilled a blank arbor for a spanner hole.

The finished arbor. I had to get rid of the thumbscrew as it was too large in diameter. Yes, that's an aluminum blank arbor - that's another long story I won't relate.

The CNC mill was set up and I started drilling.

All the holes drilled.

A Youtube video of the operation.

The Program is short and sweet:
G91
G00 X0Y0A0
M98 P1000 L7
G00 Z1.000
M30

O1000
G81 G99 X0 Y0 Z-.10 R.1 F6
G00 A51.428
M99

I'm going to tweak the program a bit as the G00 X0Y0A0 line isn't needed and I want it to move to the side for loading and unloading after running.

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