I actually machined a couple of parts today instead of just messing about and watching the machine move (which is mesmerizing in itself.)
My friend Lee Bruns sent me a couple of end mills the other day and I used the 1/8″ one to mill out a pair of mounting brackets for my Rigid trim router. These will let me bolt the router to the ShapeOko in place of the Dremel tool.
I drew up the parts (they are not exactly the same) in LibreCAD (the replacement for QCad) which is open source and works pretty well for 2D drawings.
Then I used the trial version of CamBam to create the cutter paths. It was super simple and worked quite well.
I machined them out of some 1/2″ thick HDPE (an old cutting board) and once I got the feeds and speeds correct it worked great.
If you’ll notice, there is a bump in the left hand interior, that’s because the router has a bulge where you put your hand and I had to make the part fit there. I wanted to get the two brackets as far apart on the router as I could for better stability.
Here they are on the router.
Unfortunately I need some more bolts to mount it and the hardware store closed at 6:00 tonight. Ah well. This router is surprisingly heavy and I should probably wait to mount it until I have the double X axis mod installed. (Parts should be here this week!)
