4 axis cnc machining

[headsmess]

hello! and welcome to the land of g-codes and canned cycles! 4 cycles arent enough? i got dozens of em!

jeeezus...

ok, it all started with a little mill. sieg x2 and i couldnt be bothered finding any pics or links. my phrase here is "foff"

its my catchphrase along with "shlong". and one of those whistles when given a simple task.... like, you know...."you think i can do WHAT?" type whistles... usually foff and shlong follow soon after

anyway. back to the mill! i got sick of winding wheels by hand and getting nothing in return. so i coughed up some dollars.

given the option of making bits or buying bits and fitting...i bought em!

and, after maybe 2000 dollaroonis, i got results...

i still havent really bought anysoftware. using a lot of demos and freebies still, but!

i do have a cnc mill, that does actually hold a pretty good tolerance. 0.01 mm is pretty darn tight if you ask me!

and now im stuck for simple things to make? :jester: give me ideas people!

 

[zwebx]

i have only got a lathe... i wouldnt mind a cnc mill
have you ever tried to cnc mill a head or port somthing with it..?

or take simple things like drills apart and mimic there plastic gears with metal ones

 

[Gerro]

Make some Miniriders bling parts like cam and head covers, you might get a few people willing to but them.. What type of modelling program are you using to design your parts? I use a great deal of Autodesk inventor software at work, I could model you up some parts in my spare time if you had something in mind you would like done, I'm just not sure what the workflow is to take a part from Inventor to a CNC machine..

 

[Gerro]

These are a couple of rendered images of a computer part (water block) I designed for something to do..

 

[zwebx]

would you be interested in making another one anytime?
yeah your speakin to a nerd here

 

[Gerro]

They have never actually been made. It was just something that I modelled for fun, all the dimensions are correct though..

 

[zwebx]

how large is your cnc mill?

 

[headsmess]

from the top!

yes, i ported a lil 2 stroke while i had no license and was doing the motorised pushies.

put a reed valve from a 50cc pocket rocket on it, instead of standard piston porting.

it was actually why i did the cnc conversion. you can probably tell which bit was done by hand

and strapped a mikuni 18 on to another one. theres a pic but its lousy, so no show!


to do anything like a fourstroke head would possibly be needing 5 axis for some of the angles/curves to be achieved with any decent sort of blending. cutting seats, no problem, but ports...bit harder. ive since learnt that theres actually gains to be made by REDUCING port sizes! fill em up with hi-temp adhesive! (velocity porting).

replacing gears in a drill is difficult. they dont necessarily follow any standard pitches, so you usually have to make the cutter yourself.

to be worthwhile, the gears need to be hardened. hardened gears require grinding to bring em up to tolerance after being baked and quenched and distorted. machines to grind gears are rare and expensive, but it is possible to "cut a thread" on a grindstone face, using a diamond dresser of correct profile for the gear teeth, then by engaging the gear with the thread, it roatates itself (helical groove on grindstone, not just parallel grooves) and, with a bit of traverse to cover the entire tooth face... hey presto.

its still not too easy to do. id need some sorta cnc controlled wheel dresser!

the water block. now that would be achievable, BUT! it looks like stacked plates of rather thin material? in which case laser cutting is the way to go. for mass production at least. cnc machining would be just too slow. preparing the stock (cutting up a sheet of alloy into 40mm squares?), loading a jig (jigs are important!) and any necessary tool changes. with a laser you just feed in the sheet and walk away!
the upper plate or cover, with the LS and the slight depression etc...machineable, but also better to be stamped out by the millions! in which case, you would machine the die

hop up parts and bling, they seem the best ideas so far. theres plenty of little parts on a bike that can be changed! and machining lumps of billet ali is fun


last. how big is it? too small? 220x100 table travel. tiny. might be getting a new mill soon thats ever slightly bigger but then id have to convert it too! but 600x250 is a much bigger area covered. and now i have the machine to make necessary parts

even the mill at work with 3M by 1.2M travel is too small!

 

[zwebx]

im currently building my own motorised bike #3 i havent lost my licence i just never had the chance yet to get one (im 17) this one is gonna be a 4smoke shifter

 

[FMX_22]

Nice man we have a heap of cnc gear at work. How long have you been doing it for?

 

[xLOCOx]

i know what u should make, maybe a 5speed gear setup for zongers and yxs that would be sweet as or maybe hubs dunno but if had an cnc or lathe i would be making aussie made bike china parts and sellin em on here or dhz one of em
have fun

 

[zwebx]

screw the extra gear make some gears wide and fat enough to take bigbore power

 

[xLOCOx]

hang on if they are reasonable billet material they should hold a 184 pretty reasonable (correct me if im wrong)
maybe heat treating to strengthen them


here is an idea maybe some foot pegs with the miniriders logo or a kickstart lever or a gear lever with miniriders logo on em i dunno just putting suggestions out there

 

[zwebx]

hang on if they are reasonable billet material they should hold a 184 pretty reasonable (correct me if im wrong)
maybe heat treating to strengthen them


here is an idea maybe some foot pegs with the miniriders logo or a kickstart lever or a gear lever with miniriders logo on em i dunno just putting suggestions out there

after you treat the metal they tend to get distorted and brittle so you need special tooling to grind them after they are heat treated (i mean the gears not the pegs )

 

[headsmess]

yes, heat treating means "finish grinding" for accuracy.

they can be nitrided, which is a fairly low temperature process, but requires the right types of steels to be used.

theres also "case","flame" and "induction" hardening, which only hardens the teeth themselves, with minimal distortion.

unfortunately most gearbox gears need to be "through hardened" cus they run on bearings, splines, and have dog teeth... this all costs money. leave these sorts of things to the big boys, like takegawa. they have invested multiple millions of dollars on doing these sorts of things.

gears in general are pretty complicated, any type of mass manufacturing uses pretty specialised machinery. i can cut a gear or two to get me out of trouble but i could never make 100 or so economically. just the gear i pictured earlier would be about $75 without including the price of material or the hob i bought, mounting the hob, setting up...


me, ive been doing this on and off as a hobby for five years or so, but maybe 20 years fiddling around on manual equipment.

the footpegs but, yeah, footpegs are easy. most alloy parts are!

with indicator and brake LED's fitted

 

[SIKKO_X2]

you could make some interesting 'skeletal' style parts? I think that some high end upgrades for LXR's, Motoverts etc. would be good as they would be low volume/high price parts. You could make lightened triple clamps with heaps of adjustment and options? or you could make adjustable swingarm linkages? or you could make kits that allow you to fit much larger brake calipers to the bike?

 

[zwebx]

how about these
[video=youtube;olcOdBj4CGE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_11811&feature=iv&src_vid=LlZ65BhXNDU&v=olcOdBj4CGE[/video]