My Experience So Far the good and the bad (warped rail)

[ThirdwingsLLC]

So Background why I got the machine (I feel like its important for perspective and why I choose this machine):

Am a custom gunsmith and who grew up in the good ol family machine shop, just got out of the corps and decided to expand my buisness past private sell and knew i needed to either A: get help, or B: make help, whelp the MR-1 was getting great reviews and I needed a cnc for a new product line and to get manufacturing time down so I took the Sorry for your knee caps money I saved up from the military and decided to get one.

First off the Langmuir staff has been awesome, very fast to respond very helpful, they get a 10/10, now to the machine

Now I’ve always been one the draw the short straw lets get that out of the way, picking up the machine went well and the build for the most part was straight forwards, I already have a personal machine shop equipped with a nice lathe, mill, and a generation or two of everything you’d need for them, so I had a bit of advantage getting it straight level etc.,

Fast forward a week into the Build process and I’m machining the build plate, the corners are very far off (there just stock aluminum nothing surprising) and am getting this really bad contact area from the end mill so I assumed I had a bit of nod. I went with the I don’t want to mess with the build plate too much route took a few more small passes to see if I could clean it up with no luck, i said oh well ill fix the nod with at least having a build plate relatively flat,

Finish assembling realized I didn’t have the enclosure hardware, no problem they got it to me in 2 days, all wrapped up and I’m in buisness.

The moment I get the enclosure in we start machining, and for the most part the machine works fantastic, I was machining some smaller 15-7 PH and it worked exceptional, I did notice however a consistenct unevenness when I took the part to the surface plate,

So I go to check and correct the nod when orders died down, low and behold i have 2 thou an inch, used essentially every shim they gave me before it came out now its about .2 thou every 2 inches, well with in workable parameters.

However the unevenness is still there, I check the build plate and its drastically uneven, use a fly cutter and a few hours, but its not coming out, and at this point I’m uncomfortable with the thickness of the build plate, so I do the only thing I know how, put a micrometer on absolutely everything. I took an All nighter but I found it, the X-2 rail is warped, i doesn’t seem to come out with playing with the torque of the screws, and still passes the planar test because the warp is in the middle near the front.

I don’t know how I’m going to fix this just yet, not yet confident I can. Some of the projects I have now will have to postponed since they are on the larger side and I dont know if sending it on this will waster the material or not. However our customer basis is growing so me and the wife have decided to open a youtube channel with the shops journey so If I do figure out what to do yall will hopefully get to see it,

Current objectives: figure out how to reinforce the scary thinner base plate, how to fix a warped gantry with everything cemented in place,

[randall]

@ThirdwingsLLC thanks for sharing your experience. Would you mind posting a picture of where the warp is located? I just recieved my machine and I would love to check for this warpage before laying down cement.

[AlexW]

@ThirdwingsLLC

I took an All nighter but I found it, the X-2 rail is warped, i doesn’t seem to come out with playing with the torque of the screws, and still passes the planar test because the warp is in the middle near the front.

Do you mean the Y-2 rail (embedded in the concrete on the right), or one of the linear bearings on the gantry?

How did you measure the twist?

[ThirdwingsLLC]

it was a little by accident at first, I wanted to see the deviation in the build plate and so I put my mic on the gantry and dragged it against the surface the reading were weird, as if the gantry was being shifted up or down so I out a surface plate on my build plate, I understood I could not check for alignment since I cannot confirm alignment with anything, however Checking for relative straightness should be easy, sweep the surface mic along the rail and use the reading of variance per every half inch to essentially graph it and see how straight the line is, but what I found was there was a a roughly 3 inch section that went up and down in height relative to the build plate but not the rest of the rail. Did the same thing on the bearing rail and saw that it reflected the curve, also noted the curve was inconstant corresponding to the x axis, put a few fresh parralels on there to find it didnt lay flat, I continued to clean the rails even more and repeating this test a few more times and repeated with the Y-1 (Sorry your are correct Y-2 rail is what i meant) the y-1 rail did not replicate the numbers.

[TeeKay]

What’s the name of your youtube channel? Would enjoy seeing your progress.

[ThirdwingsLLC]

Im still getting the channel ready havent publicly releases anything yet but I do now have a plan on how to fix/upgrade the system

[ThirdwingsLLC]

FIXED:

I fixed the problem and upgraded the system a bit by make 1 inch risers out of some hot rolled steel, I machined them identical to the y axis beams and ground them true the used a surface plate to do the good ol scraping method to the original y axis. It tool a while but eventually i got them flat flat. From there to add more material to the base plate i got a 24x24x.75 plate of steel machine one side flat and hole to interface with the aluminum plate, and holes for two vices, added some 1x4 bars to connect it to the upper support beams. The surface is reading true, I have much less warp (within about a thou) and now i can use magnets in. It holds true and tram very happy with the upgrades and have extra mounting area. Now to design a 5th axis