Picked up some 10mm aluminium tooling plate today. I intend to use this for various brackets and mounting surfaces on the redesign. Its very hard, unlike most alu I've seen before and it has a ring to it when struck. Hope it won't be too hard going for my router.
Bit of an aside: what spindle-speed, depth-per-pass, ipm and drill do you use for routing out Al ? I'm going to have to do some soon, and I've never routed Al. Are you using any coolant or directed air blown / sucked to help out ?
Simon, this was my first attempt, but these are the settings that worked best for me. I used mm/min
Plunge speed was kept at 40mm/min for all cuts. The router complained most when the plunge speed was much higher than 40.
Spindle speed was set as low as I could set it before I heard any strange noises. Wood routers like the little Bosch are not ideal as they generally spin way too fast for aluminium cutting.
Pass depth was 1mm.
End mill was a 5mm carbide up cutting bit.
No coolant or directed air.
Speed was 100mm/min for the holes then 300mm/min for profiled outside.
Spaced Cowboy, I routed out a few more parts yesterday.
I had problems routing out the outer profiles at a speed of 300mm/min the alu melted and stuck to the bit causing the router to stall. Slowing down the router to 120mm/min for all cuts seem to work better. My spindle speed was about 17,000 Rpm.
I have a motor and a screw on each side of the gantry. If one motor decides to move and leave the other behind, it was cause damage to multiple parts of the laser.
I have an idea to create a safety system to de-power the servo drives if the gantry runs out of parallel. It would be based on an ardunino laser trip wire project of which there are many iterations online, here is one for example
Like the example above I would have the laser mounted one side of the gantry and an LDR connected to the other side.
When the gantry moves out of alignement the laser would move off target and sound the alarm, instead of a buzzer I would have a relay which would supply 12v to the servo enable pins.