Downing's CNC PCB Test !

[Downing]

So today I engraved my first PCB! Man the designing stage on this took forever and after I got it done, I still didn't have it quite right in terms of the project it's going into. But that's to be expected on a first draft. You get your ideas down, test them, test them again and then refine and test again.

Before using my PCB board I wanted to do a couple test runs on some scrap styrene I had. Was a good thing I did because that allowed me to get my depths and speeds correct.


After I got some satisfactory results with the plastic, I moved up to the PCB board. I'll let the pictures show the rest!










Video
And here is a video with those pics and the whole thing in action. This could really open up a lot of doors, but the key is to get very very good at the software. I'm finding new things out with it every day. But this is why prototyping takes so long and portable building for that matter. Things have to be learned. More coming soon!

http://www.youtube.com/user/cndowning1082?feature=mhee

[bacteria]

That is awesome!

[nova1313]

Curious where are you getting your end mills from? We've been buying ours from Precise bits but the cost is kind of high. The tips of the engraving mills can very easily break when doing circuit boards.

Are you also doing the drilling with the CNC? We were using the slowest speed, pecking to drill and got good results.

[Downing]

I'm actually using the stock engraving bits for this if you can believe that. haha. However for the cutting bit I used the ones I bought from this site.

http://stores.ebay.com/CARBIDE-PLUS?_tr ... 7675.l2563

I bought 3 single flute 1/8" center cutting bit from them for I think $24 bucks and they have worked great on plastic and wood. Haven't tried metal yet nor do I really plan to.
They say everything is made by US manufactures and the prices are very reasonable. I actually just bought a 10 piece micro drill bit set for $16 shipped that I hope to have by Saturday that will do the holes as at the time of the video I did not have.

No complaints so far.

[Downing]

I spend a good deal of time yesterday working on test pieces of styrene for the PCB cuts I'll be making for the SNES-001 Advance II. I do these tests because styrene is about the same thickness as the copper PCB board and a fraction of the cost per sq/inch. It's also a good thing to do as well because it's much softer and if some hidden line decides to drill and move with it's less likely to snap the bit you're using which I unfortunately did last night with the last hole that needed drilling.

But I took a short video of the drilling of the last holes on the styrene last night and it just goes to show how unforgiving even a simple error is when dealing with such high precision.



Also here are a couple pics of my progress so far. I started experimenting with the cutting of wooden molds as well. These pics are of the first attempt but I didn't have the right bit. I now have the proper tooling in hand so I'll be trying this again hopefully today. I'll be starting up a thread about this once I get the o.k. to start building. So more updates soon!