Taig CNC Machine Usage

[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…