Finally! The mill arrived!

After 6 months of waiting I noticed Chester had the Eagle 25 mill on special offer. I called them and found out that this indeed meant the new lot of mills had arrived!
I borrowed some money to pay off the outstanding bill on it and got delivery arranged as soon as possible, since I didn’t want mine to be the last of the lot for a couple of reasons;

  • If there was something wrong with it, I wanted there still to be one to replace it with.
  • If I waited until there weren’t many left, I’d risk getting the obviously less than immaculate ones.

So yesterday around 3pm, it arrived!

I’d had some trouble with Chester when trying to find out how large the actual crate would be, since it was coming to a domestic property and we have a nice domestic garden-gate it’d have to get through. I’d been told it was 90cm wide, so to expect packaging a few cm larger than that. So as a result I was fully expecting to have to dismantle it on the pavement outside to move it in.

Fortunately the crate, once off the pallet was just small enough to fit into the front garden. :)

The reason for this was it’s packed diagonally to save space, so the crate wasn’t as wide or deep.

And there she is. :3

Checked the manual and with help from Andy, broke it down into; the base, motor, headstock, and column. Then we lugged it through to the workshop.

Whew! That’s a hell of a weight off my mind now.

I generally like the layout, though there’s a couple of niggles; the belt housing lacks an extra hatch that’s in the manual so it can be opened when the head is in a lowered position. It also has mains cabling running through it within milimeters of the spindle pulley. The quality of the table casting is also a bit rough. But of all the Chinese tools I’ve bought it’s probably the best, and I bought it understanding it would need tweaking.

It’s the R8 taper version with metric leadscrews (2mm pitch). I’ll need to make some adaptors and stand-offs for the the table portion.

The top-box should come off fairly easily, though the spindle pully is a lot larger than I expected. This might make it trickier to position the big DC motor. But overall nothing has been thrown up that can’t be overcome.

I’m going to knock a couple of other small projects out of the way before I really get started on it, but should be able to work on it pretty easily come the new year. :)

Enclosure arrived!

The enclosure found on ebay arrived today. My guestimates (since internal size wasn’t mentioned) look to have panned out, and it’ll contain all the parts quite nicely.

Fortunately I had a piece of aluminium plate left over from my grandfathers materials which will provide the needed backplate for the plastic box. It feels nice using something that was his in any of my projects.

The driver board will just about fit in, though I’ll need to be creative with mounting the power supply. I’ll be cutting some holes in the top access panel for the driver’s D-connectors, the IEC connector will probably go on the top or side where gravity shouldn’t let it fall out. Bottom is probably going to have the illuminated mains switch and the five 4-pin XLR connectors for the steppers and motor drive. The left-hand panel will have the filter-protected exhaust vent.

A fine wire filter grill will be going on the front panel to direct air onto the PSU, which will flow across the box and out the exhaust. The box should be kept at positive pressure. The box is far more environmentally sealed than I really need. All I really want to ensure is no dirt and spiders get in it.

Also found a few little 12v fans that should replace the defective one on the driver board. Got a 24v 80mm fan for the front that came off an old LaserJet printer. Not sure where to put the emergency stop yet. Got to be the soft-off interlock on the driver board I think, since cutting power might still leave steppers moving for a short time. Also might not want it on the enclosure itself, but remote.

Mounting the readout is also a puzzler, but can be done later.