Taig CNC Machine Usage

[Gear105]

I want to do a little bit of a poll. Out of the people who have been trained on the CNC machine, who is still using it? What have you been making? I want to make projects on the machine more visible to help get a better sense of how to use and improve the training. I am here to help.

[mike]

I wanted to illustrate what went from a little side, slow-burn project to a rush job.

Most years I participate at Siggraph for my job. I’m part of a larger organization, but we wanted something to separate out our little ‘cool group’ from the rest of the big org.

I decided to make little badges we can wear with our product’s logo on it. But I didn’t want just a simple button, I wanted a 3d manifestation of our logo.

Over many months, I ended up learning how to mill this little guy out.

That got cast, and I made plastic versions and painted them… lots of them…

Then, the weekend before Siggraph came, and it turns out the awards for the honor we give every year didn’t arrive in the mail. They rushed to me and asked ‘what can you make us?’

Well, I had a design, why not modify it a little and go with it. I knew it would work, just a matter of some adjustments. I decided to scale up the little buttons into medals (similar to finisher medals in a marathon).

I had a hell of a time figuring out how to mount the thing, the stock wouldn’t fit in any jaws nicely, so I notched a ring near the bottom of my stock on the manual mill to give me something to hold on to.

Once mounted, I used the clever indicator in the spindle setup to find my center. This was awesome, I found the center quickly because of tools made by others.

Within the same day they asked, I had the master machined!

I took it off the mill, cut it from the blank and cast the mold. A couple days later, I had all the medals in plastic (if I could have made them fast enough, they would have been nice as metal… but limitations)

Moments before the event happened, the original awards arrived, but we gave the winners both. Here they are at the ceremony.

I love that machine and look forward to making mechanical things next.

PS: if you ever want to learn a LOT about CAM, try doing lettering on a curved surface

[lukecyca]

Here are some of my projects over the past year:

Eccentric spacers for wheel tensioning on my bottler

Mounting brackets for aluminum extrusions (aluminum and UHMW)

Aluminum bracket for pre-tension spring (also for bottler)

The delrin bushing was made on our lathe!

Strike plate for heritage wood door (I wanted the patina)

Punching keyed holes in plastic enclosures

[Majicj]

I’ve not had a chance to use the mill in the last little while. It’s a great machine and I have plans for a few projects.

Below is list of things that I’ve made on the Taig. I think one writeup is missing which was an embossing plate that I used for embossing paper.

Making a Brass Branding Iron

A wood working acquaintance of mine asked if I could machine them a branding iron from brass. I’m always up for doing new things so I said sure. They sent me a dxf file of their design. There were a couple of things to fix. First was that letters need to be mirrored when branding as the burnt image is the reverse of the brand. The second issue was that the DXF path segments were not contiguous. I fixed both of these up using Inscape which is a great free vector drawing package. Below is the …

Making an Aluminum Triskele - Taig Machining and Manual Lathe

I’ve been playing around with this design for a while. It’s been modelled in Fusion 360 and loosely based on a Triskele but uses a golden mean spiral generated from Fibonacci’s sequence. Then machined on the Taig and then a slice taken off with the metal lathe. I came across this youtube video on Golden spiral - Fusion360 Importing equations. I learned how to generate a series of 3D points using Excel and then save these as a CSV file. You can then import these points into Fusion360 with a ne…

My Fusion 360 3D Modeling and Taig 3D CNC Machining Exercise

In the ongoing quest of furthering my limited 3D modelling and CNC machining skillz I set myself the task of modelling and machining a small part. The fusion 360 model is essentially a single sphere cut in half with an angled slice cut out of the top part and then a small arc revolved inside the slice to create a dimple. This was then circular patterned around a center axis. Fillets applied to all the joins and then added an extruded circular base to finish this model off. Then it was on to C…

CNC Aluminum Fidget Spinner

tl;dnr - I made a fidget spinner. See my Youtube Fidget Spinner video. Slightly longer version I recently saw some Youtube videos of various fidget spinners and spinner builds. I liked them and figured this would be a great project for the VHS Taig CNC mill. Started off with a 3D design in Autodesk Fusion 360. Worked out some CAM paths and then cut the top and bottom part out of aluminum bar stock. Some pics below. The top and bottom are mirror images so only one set of C…

Circle Dies - or the Joys of CNC Machining

I’ve been wanting to make metal dies that I can use to cut designs out of paper using a Sizzix Big Kick die cutting machine pictured below. [image] The Big Kick is essentially just two rollers that you push a sheet of paper with a cutting die sandwiched between two plastic sheets through. The rollers pinch the paper and cutting die together and you end up with a piece removed from the paper. [image] The cutting dies are essentially flat sheets of metal with a small sharp raised edge that cut…

My first Taig CNC Mill project

So having taken the awesome Taig CNC Mill class taught by @Gear105 I thought I’d put what I’d learned to use so that I didn’t forget. To be honest I am a complete newbie and only managed to get this tiny project completed with a lot of help from @Gear105 @rsim and @Lukeo I decided go ‘small’ and ‘simple’ by making a tile 1x1/2 inch square that is 1/8th of an inch thick that has a circle in the middle. Think of the game X’s and O’s. However in this case thinner did not equate to easier as I…

[JDMc]

It’s been quite a while since I’ve machined anything on the Taig since my first few practise parts:

I don’t have any projects immediately pressing, but not having my own set of bits and being unsure of the status of the shared ones has been a bit of a hurdle in the past. Maybe a recommendation for a ‘starter kit’?

[iMakeRobots]

I want to use it, but every time I’ve gone in all the parts are locked away. I guess I need a refresher.

[mike]

Are you confusing the Grizzly with the Taig? Most of the parts for the Taig are on the shelves.