Started assembly last night and had the concrete pour finished up around 2 this afternoon. Smooth sailing so far so hopefully I will be epoxy coating by the end Thursday and making chips by the end of next weekend. I also need to make a top for the enclosure as well this week because I would like to cut down of noise in the shop a bit where I can.
Word of advice that I figured out during the pour, a sawzall with no blade pushed up against the chip tray makes an excellent tamper.
Looking great. I like how you took the time to cleanup all the concrete splatter. I’m OCD myself. I cut a top out for mine also. 1/8 3000 series aluminum sheet. Left it shiny for the inside to reflect the light. Going to a long 5 days pal.
Great job, looking very clean! 
The trick will be keeping it clean with it being so close to the cross fire pro next to it haha. I wanted to keep the machining area further separated from my fab area but there’s only so much you can do with 130sq ft.
I too definitely will try a few ideas to keep the noise down. In your case you may need to do something to stiffen this large flat panel top so it doesn’t become a drum. Maybe a few beads from a bead roller? Or stick on some dynamat to the outside?
Looks great!
Good point. The bead idea sounds good. Maybe I’ll put some automotive sound barrier
like Dynamat on the top. We shall see how much noise or vibration I get. I don’t care about the noise really. That noise is kinda like the sound of a Ferrari to me. Sick huh?
Brilliant call. I think Dynamat or Frog Skin would really help with noise.
To try and get ahead of my own stupidity for when I end up crashing a program or something, and because I had the electronics enclosure open for the high power z driver swap. I decided to relocate the E Stop switch to the front of the machine base tonight. Real easy change since the switch is just a simple in/out continuity switch. I added on maybe 4 feet of thermostat wire to the stock wires that will run up to the switch.
I figure that even though the laptop has a estop switch in Cut Control if a tool breaks or program crashes I want something solid to smack and be done rather than fumble around on my keyboard. My electronics enclosure will also be a bit difficult to reach as well being at the back of the machine and right up against the plasma table. I may look at moving the spindle and motor driver switches up to this same spot in the future but they wont be quite as easy to move. Id like to put those on relays so all the high current/voltage stays in the enclosure
We got our machine fully up and running this weekend. All that is left is fine shimming on the x/z carriage and the motion compensation values in cut control. Surfacing the baseplate went very well and we opted to just run the machine manually with the fly cutter on. Most of our tooling is still in transit from lakeshore carbide but we have a job coming up in about a week that we will get to test out the mr1 on. We’ll be drilling out and retapping a set of existing stud holes in some hubs that will be accepting larger hardware. So we will be making a couple fixture plates for the ops as well.
Also added a few lights in the enclosure as well for when we put a lid on the top
Looks fantastic! Really like the LED setup.
