Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Very small miller/engraver

> P.P.S. I will be offering plans for this bigger small mill w/
> toolchanger, which is derivative, but not a copy of, the maxnc plans.
> (hint: I've been playing with the IDEAS used in dental handpieces for
> use in small machine spindles). But my first 2 books are ahead of
> these plans in the pipeline.

I've been wondering about just how small you could go with a home mill. And
then I had this brilliant plan that no one else has ever had before [grin]
while I was reading my Edmund Optics catalog. Why not use positioning stages
for moving optical components around? I had a bit of a read on Edmund's site
about them and you can get some with a few centimetres of travel on the X &
Y for about $250 - $350. What's great about them is their precision,
claiming to have 2 MICRONS of table wobble and deviation.

I began thinking how easy it'd be to knock together these together since
they are sold as modules and are sold specifically for 'knocking together'
on optic position tables. It gets better when they start offering rotary
tables, now we can mill micron size engine spindles. : ) The bite? Check
out how much they cost with the motors and controllers fitted. $350 becomes
$3500. I'm guessing this is because they appear to use a planetary gear set
and also the controller looks flashy, with possible L.E.D'age. But would
there be any way other than planetary gears to achieve accuracies in
transmission that would be suitable for these tables? Would a toothed belt
and gear be too innaccurate? If it is, what's used on the big high accuracy
mills?

My thoughts ran to building a 'mill' from these modules and mounting a
spindle like a dentists hand piece like you say, so sub 1mm tooling could be
used. I'm quite interested in steam engines and building my own machines at
some point but I'm also really interested in all this sub-micron and nano
machining that's going on. These optical tables offer quite a cheap way to
obtain micron accuracies and would let you mill things that appeared as
monster sizes on the mill even if they measured just 1 cubic cm in all. I
wondered also about thermal stability as heat generated by the tip might be
a problem when it warms up the table. Flood cooling = bad plan due to the
slides being uncovered, bare really. Hand pieces like the Turbo-Carver vent
the air they drive their turbines on so perhaps this would be enough to cool
the bit?

If it was possible to drive these positioning stages cheaply enough it would
be interesting to see what could be made. Some of the things I've seen on TV
that were made by nano machining with lasers are mind blowing. I saw one
inparticular about nuclear weapons and part of the program to keep their
workers interested is nano engineering of mirror assemblies. The mirrors
slide up just as the bomb detonates to reflect the radiation and concentrate
it in some form. The entire mirror assembly was smaller than a little bug
they had running around on it. Little tiny cute motors and gear sets making
it flash. Real cool.

John H.