Just arrived (knew of the Mag but not the forum - oops)

Hi Peeps,

Just created an account. I'm an old geezer, well I started my Apprecnticeship as a Toolmaker in 1972, spent around 10 years in the industry doing some well known stuff and a lot of aerospace prototyping, lens / optics related stuff as well as some 'household names' e.g., if you ever had a BT type 706 telephone, you were holding parts made on press tools made by me, in your hand or if you had one of the ubiquitous pressure cookers with three triangular (with radiiused outer edges), chances are they were made on a press tool / made / repaired by me. Other works included parts for German Govt sponsored medical laser R&D.

Ended up in the Semi-Con industry and having retired (almost), have built my own little Toolroom, with a 8/28" lathe and a small vertical mill.

Current project is a Making / Fabricating a Surface Grinder from scratch with granite bedways / tables, ball-screws, linear rails and servo motors which will be driven be an SBC with pseudo-analog controls. So each control handwheel shaft will have a rotary encoder on it, which the SBC will convert to ball-screw motion, thus moving the tables and grinding wheel head height, adjustable in s/w for feed rate from quite quick (to emulate some of the best steel cable driven grinders to very slow for very fine positional accuracy, ideally giving me 1µm wheel downfeed when needed., let's see how it turns out...

The mechanical parts are mostly done (wheel spindle and drive, not yet) and the electronics / control still to be done. If it works out well, I had in my mind to make a Cylinder grinder after this but maybe not needed (I have a cutter grinder, so maybe it's overkill.

I'd be 'really' interested if anyone was daft enough / dedicated enough to do something similar/

All, the Best, Cheers, Martin.

Welcome to the forum. The surface grinder sounds pretty good. Can you program a profile to grind as I always thought that would be great.

David.

Thanks for my 'Welcome'.

I haven't started on the MCU yet to do any programming. At present I am leaning toward the TI LaunchPad DevKit Controllers as I have another project lined up for (the Autumn) an electronic leadscrew for my lathe (which a You-Tuber in the US made and I liked it so much so, that I bought his PCB ready (so it makes sense to use one platform for both machines. Technically, there should be no reason at all why it couldn't be controlled by CNC and / or have some stand-alone routines / profiles inbuilt. I am not the best coder in the world and started out way back on the Motorola 6809 > 68000 > (with a little Z80 along the way). What I lack in experience in coding, I hope to be able to compensate make up for with other kinds-souls from the "Internet Community"

The reason I went the MCU / µProcessor route is the simplest way in my mind to get accurate (very fine control) of the motion of the axes using ball-screws / servo motors, rather than trying to engineer mechanical motion ('Rack & Pinion', 'Steel-Cable drive' or 'Hydraulic Motors & Pump', whether I am right or not remains to be seen. I hope I'm right in my thinking (almost all modern machines are built this way now), fingers crossed...

Hopefully, when it's done I can make notes, sketches etc. for others, if anyone wants (I have already collected a hard disk full of video, which I will shove on YouTube if it will help other people.

All the Best, Martin.

Welcome to the forum Martin, nice to see someone into something different from the norm.

Brian

Welcome!

You are into a very interesting and useful project!

Howard

Hi Martin,

If you dig around a bit there's an excellent thread here on a milling machine made using epoxy composite.

Neil

You could look here Martin ...

**LINK**

John McNamara has been doing some excellent work with reinforced epoxy. 

Somewhere along this table were samples of his efforts. Unfortunately, I missed getting up close. 

Good luck,

Sam

Edited By Sam Stones on 10/06/2020 22:30:05