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Saturday, October 5, 2024

Avoiding the Chop Saw

My wife gets freaked out by the chop saw.  I confess that if I can cut material in a less dangerous way, all the better.

I need to cut a 30 degree angle on some .99" aluminum square material.  An alternative strategy is put the material in a mill vise on the rotating table and run a carbide end mill through the material after turning the rotary table to 30 degrees.

I am working up to this because I am still easily fatigued.

Part of the set-up is getting the workpiece exactly at a right angle to the mill table.  Here is the workpiece in the mill vise on the rotary table.


Now squaring the workpiece to the mill table.  I used a square to get the mill vise square to the Z axis:



The next step is to zero the Y-axis at the end of the workpiece, ask the rotary table to turn 30 degrees and move the end mill to 1.75" cos 30 and slice across.  I will write some code with a bash script to make repeated cuts .01" deeper each time until I have cut through it.

It is slower cutting (while avoiding jams caused by too high a speed).


2 comments:

  1. It appears to me you could cut 17 pieces with the chop saw before you ever get close to setting up the millermatic thingy to do it the slow way.

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  2. Yes, but the mill does not remove fingers unless you are remarkably stupid.

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