Let me first start out by saying how I love milling HDPE (High Density Poly Ethylene). It machines like butter! So easy!
This past friday I decided to help out a coworker who needed some CNC wizardry to develop tool paths for a precise part. I started out making this part in MakerCam, a free web application that generates all the "Gcode" for our CNC machine at work to read.
Once all the operations were assigned, Drilling, Pocket, Profile, and Profile I was off to clamp the work piece down and set my home position. For this part in particular it was absolutely CRUCIAL that I got the coordinates right because we needed all the material, so no room for failure. Knowing all this, I probably set my feed rates EXTREMELY conservative, and also should have used a tool change to speed up the process but I was afraid of introducing room for error with the tool change that this part took a little under 3 hours to complete! For the next job I run on this machine, I will be sure to move faster, there was really no reason for me to run that slow.
That being said though...
The absolute precision of this hobby-level machine being precise to the hundreths (0.01 in) place, was really something special and not something reproducible by human hands easily.
Here is the finished product. Notice the drilling operation in the center, the spiral tool path of the pocket operation, and the rectangular profile operation.
All paths were programmed with MakerCam.
GrblController was used to run the the machine.
The machine is a Shapeoko 2 built by Aaron Delanty and myself for the Betty Brinn Children's Museum.
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