April 12, 2017

Today I did something I should have done long ago - Filmed the CNC with the FLIR camera! We have a FLIR E60 thermal camera. I am pretty impressed with how cool it looks, and there’s even a chance that we might learn something here.  I’m cutting about 0.006″ off the surface of a piece of white acetal (Delrin ®©™) plastic with an indexable carbide fly cutter spinning at 2500 RPM. and about 25 inches per minute feed rate.  I realize that this is probably pretty fast on the spindle and slow on the feed, but it makes for a great video. Sorry for the bad focus. You can really see how a lot of the heat ends up in the chips, and plenty ends up in the workpiece too, but since it’s plastic and a great insulator, the picture is a bit deceiving. Aluminum would quickly dissipate the heat of cutting in to the bulk of the material, but the Delrin lets it sit right at the surface. These are the blanks for winch parts for a simple Drawbot  Enjoy!