There's no point procrastinating any further: it's time to clamp some aluminium down and see what happens. It seems a facing cut is not a sensible thing to do to MDF, but it cleaned up OK with a light sanding: I was still afraid to try aluminium, so I started by cutting this part out of MDF. These are added by a toolpath 'dressup'Īre quite a few dressup types available, they all work by taking in a path that has already been generated, and modifying it in some way (here, by making it These tags are then broken by hand to free the part from the stock it is cut out of. This is so that the part does not break loose towards theĮnd of the cut. You can also see that with the outer profile I have left some 'tags' of material in place (the path moves up and then down to leave a triangle shape behind). You might have to zoom in to properly see the toolpaths, but you should be able to see that this time I generated a facing cut on the top surface,Ī hole all the way through with a step at the bottom, and a slot that only goes to half the depth. (This is the toolpath I eventually settled on, with very small step down, not the first one I tried). I learnt that for next time I'll need to go into the tool settings in FreeCADĪt this point I wanted to try cutting some aluminium, so I modelled a more realistic test part and generated toolpaths for it. Why there is so much tear-out around the edges of the holes. You can see that it took a pretty aggressive bite, which I think is This worked, but it was a very rough cut: I modelled this part:Īlthough at this stage I couldn't work out how to generate a toolpath for the square pocket around the edge, so I only ended upĬutting out the circular holes. Now that I'm clearly an expert at operating the machine, it was time to fire up FreeCAD's Path workbench and

What happened, but it was basically uneventful and worked fine! This is what I ended up with: 'jogging' the tool position using the buttons in the UGS interface. Once Grbl was all working correctly, I clamped a small piece of plywood to the bed, fitted a 2mm end mill and made my first cuts, manually This journey started with converting the machine to Grbl because I'm not interested in running I have bought a '6040' CNC router, and have been getting to grips with how to use it. First steps into CNC machining Mon 5 October 2020

Freecad cnc router