- You can't have computerized numeric control
without, of course, a computer.
And while the Linux PC embedded in the door might be weak,
the mill that it's attached to is capable of chewing
through solid titanium.
But to hell... (sputtering)
But to tell the whole story of this amazing machine,
I need to go back in time,
in time,
in time.
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(upbeat music)
We've all been there.
You bring home your new furniture from Ikea
spread everything out on the living floor and go...
Living floor. Kill me.
Spread all the bits and pieces
out on the living room floor and go,
"What the heck was I thinking skimping
"on the assembly service?"
Well, this video is that, but on steroids.
Due to COVID restrictions,
Tormach is not offering onsite setup of their CNC mills,
which means we're gonna have to assemble it ourselves,
all two thousand
six hundred
and twenty-nine pounds of it.
So what do we do? We just kind of go for it or what?
- Ah, it's, I mean- - Kind of...
Hold on a second. (bang on wood)
- This is why we can't have nice things.
Oh God.
- He's been so excited to build this thing.
- So much! It's just been sitting here for weeks.
- All right. Have fun. See you later!
- Now, I get to do the fun stuff.
So let's get to look at my new mill.
Oh, that's my timer.
I gotta go get my COVID shot
and it'll take us this long (claps).
We're back. Okay.
(wood ripping open)
Whoooooa.
Oh hello.
That's my new toy, it's the Tormach 1100 MX.
It spins up to 10,000 RPM.
It is an absolute unit.
So these are the chip trays.
These are what hold the chips as we're machining,
it catches the mess,
which our router doesn't do a great job of already.
And they are, big.
(bangs) Bong!
(wood ripping open)
That's a chunk of metal.
(upbeat music)
It's been two weeks
since we started working on this machine
and we have to put all of the sheet metal on the machine.
We have to hook up the PC.
We're gonna put on the tool changer,
and we're gonna get to play
with some lovely machine parts.
And we'll come back once it's ready
to actually start moving again.
- Everything about this looks really expensive.
- Yeah.
- Look at these.
- Yeah! These are all balanced to go up to 10,000 RPM.
- How much did I pay for these?
- Well, they also sent a bunch of pretty carbide.
That is a sharp boy.
- Uh, yeah.
- So that's a three flute,
high helix aluminum finish. - Ow!
- Yeah, don't do that.
Everything in here is now turning on and ready.
(laughing)
- Well, no, I mean, you told me these things
don't stop for nothing, so.
Ta-da!
I'm not seeing movement on Y.
Something's funky with Y it's flashing green.
- I bet you I didn't tighten the collar enough
on the y-axis motor and I bet it's just spinning.
- One of our new engineers is laughing at me
kind of, you know, marveling at this.
Knows I have no idea how to operate it.
Here's something I know a thing or two about. Okay.
Computer mice.
The ergonomics of this thing,
they could be a little better.
The finest silicone sheath overtop
of the most generic Chineasiam mouse.
(upbeat music)
- I am covered in met chips,
This is fun!
Let's go flick a switch.
(machine whirring)
- [Man Off screen] Wuh-oh!
Wuhohohohohoh!
Uh, is that the coolant pump running?
- [Colin] Uh... yes!
Maybe it's the uh... automatic oiler.
(machine hissing)
- Tool changers. How do they work?
Okay, let's fill it with coolant.
(grunts)
(water dumping)
Oh, shit, well,
that coolant pump's been running dry this whole time.
Did you plug it into an accessory
rather than into the coolant pump pump?
- [Man off screen] Oh, my god! Yes I did!
- Yeah. Okay.
Well, that might have destroyed the pump.
- [Man of screen] Ahhhhhhgh.
- Okay. Is it in the coolant one now?
- [Man off screen] Yes it is! - Okay.
- [Man off screen] That's... that's embarrassing.
(water flowing)
- Okay.
Wooooo!
[Man off screen] Heavy?
- Uh, huh! (tapping on metal plate)
- Now short of pulling off the CPU heat sink,
which appears to be glued on.
So I'm probably not gonna do that.
We have no way of knowing exactly what this computer is.
Other than that, it's running four gigs of Kimtigo RAM.
It has a 64 gig PCI express SSD,
another mini PCIE slot over here, and a SIM slot.
And then this is a funny one.
It's got about the bangin-est speakers
that I've ever seen in an embedded machine,
but there's a good reason for that,
because when this thing is running,
it can actually get pretty loud.
So if it needs to make a noise
that you actually need to hear
from inside the sealed enclosure,
I guess that's pretty much the way to do it.
Honestly, though, this little Linux box is not
the most interesting part of the computerized control.
Coming past our mist coolant reservoir.
We've got, ah, here it is.
And it goes, oh oh oh oh oh,
so here is the 220 volt transformer.
So that's where power gets transformed
into all the different voltages
that we're gonna need.
Here is, oh, this thing is super cool.
This pretty much what it is
is a gigantic ceramic resistor with a heat sink on it.
And what it does is whenever you wanna stop
the spindle spinning, you actually need to take the power
that the spindle would otherwise
continue to generate and get rid of it somehow.
So it's just this gigantic resistor that just
stops it right dead.
On the topic of spindle control.
Of course we wanna do more than just stop it.
And this puppy right here is our spindle VFD
or Variable Frequency Drive.
You could think of this kind of like a PWM fan header
on your motherboard that can make it run
at different speeds depending on how often it pulses power
except on absolute fricking steroids.
So we can drive the main spindle at up to 10,000 RPM
and all the way down to what? 100 something like that?
- [Man off Screen] Yup!
- Fancy!
The rest of this is cable management,
a variety of breakers and relays.
Here's another power supply.
And that leads to this puppy right here.
So this you could think of as kind of
like our secondary brains of the operation,
and what this basically does
is it takes whatever signal comes out
of our Linux computer at the front,
and turns it into something
that all of our motors can understand.
So our X, Y, Z,
will all get a signal that they can interpret from this.
This is probably our best look at the clear path
servo motors that drive the X, Y, and Z axes.
So compared to stepper motors, which are what we use
on our CNC router, they're not as torquey.
But, they actually know exactly
where they are rotationally.
So it can relay that information to the computer.
The computer can say, okay,
I know exactly where this other one is,
and you can actually have the motors work together.
We could actually hard mount our tap,
and then we could have both our Z axis,
and our main spindle work together,
to just drive it in, tap the hole,
take it back out, (snaps) and we're done.
I actually lied a little bit.
This one, is not technically a servo motor.
It does have the same magnetic array
and the same hall effect sensor
that allows it to know exactly how many times
it's spinning and where it is.
It's just that it sends that raw data
over to our computer to process,
rather than having an onboard encoder that sends it out.
Sorry.
However they do it,
Tormach has another, even more important reason
for needing to know the exact position of the main spindle.
And that is for tool changes.
Now on any normal CNC mill
you would need to be able to change out your tools,
'cause you might have a different size bit,
or a different function bit
that you need to pop into the main spindle.
So the way you would normally do that
is you line up your little doggies,
(machine hisses) oh, there we go.
There it is. Look at that! Ha!
And then you press that again.
Hey, look at it go!
But this one is special.
This puppy has a carousel
that can hold up to 12 different tool-holders,
allowing you to do complex jobs
with the tools automatically changing.
So what it'll do is it'll line it up
exactly where it's needed.
The tool changer comes in, grabs it, spins around,
pops another one, in the whole thing
is pneumatically driven,
and the whole job just (pops tongue) nice -- goes!
So cool!
Of course, none of does anything
without the computer to control it.
We've got a pretty sweet touchscreen interface for it,
but whether you're running touchscreen,
or a spongy mouse and keyboard,
you're gonna be running a version of Linux CNC
called Path Pilot.
And one of the coolest things
about Path Pilot compared to Mach 3
the control system that runs our router over there,
is that it actually runs at the speed of the processor.
With Mach 3, you send a command to the board,
that then processes, and outputs step and direction signals
to move the motor.
That means when you hit stop on the router,
it still has to process those extra commands,
before it even sees the stop.
Now you can emergency stop it,
but doing that means you kill power to everything,
and you have to re-reference the machine,
which is a big boatload of suck!
On the Tormach, if you hit feed hold, and a program,
it stops.
And we'll show you that,
but first, just, I wanna,
gotta play around with this thing a little bit.
So if you wanna set your rip-em's
let's do 5,000.
(machine whirs) Neat, huh?
We can stop it.
And then we actually put in just a little
simple program here.
So it's just moving this back and forward,
on the X axis, and I'm gonna go, whoa
(mumbling) It's held! Ah!
Let's stop and reset and show you guys
something else that's really cool though.
Aside from the tool, and making sure
that the path it's gonna follow is right,
the main two things you need to concern yourself with
when you're cutting different materials,
are the speed of the spindle,
and then the feed rate as the machine moves around
on all the different axes.
While some piece of metal might be
really consistent from one sample to the next,
a material like wood, it could be all over the place,
and you could go, yeah, 2,000 usually good,
but, why don't we try to turn this up a little bit,
and see how it goes.
You can do all of that without changing your program,
and you can do the same thing for your feed rate as well.
So if I stop this, and I start my cycle again.
(machine whirs)
What?
Of course you can have all the precision
in the world up here,
but if your part is not held in place extremely securely,
you're just gonna end up with a giant mess.
And that is where this comes in.
So this puppy right here, is absolutely covered
in these threaded holes that have these super
handy little plastic inserts.
So what you can do is you can take, say,
okay, we want a Mod Vise here, which is really cool,
'cause it can hold on to just a sliver of your materials,
so you can work on one side
then just like shave off the back.
We can put a regular vice in here.
We could put a fourth access in here.
And then what you do is you tell the machine, okay
I've got this offset,
for when I'm gonna mount it in that thing.
And without redoing your program, re-zeroing
or re-indicating the machine,
you're ready to freaking go.
Now, one of the most (grunts) useful things
that you can do with this feature,
is you can add an additional axis.
Neat. Right?
So unlike our CNC router,
which is perfect for making 2 1/2 D parts,
the new mill here, is four axis.
This is an A-axis,
which is a rotational axis, along, the X-axis.
So you could take apart,
and you could actually roll it,
and work on the sides, or on the back,
without taking it out and repositioning it.
Super neat!
Oh yeah. This is a perfect example
of the kind of part that,
what with maybe two or three resets,
you could make in a setup like this
the bike pedal!
Sort of Colin's old job.
That's okay, he likes this new job better.
- [Colin] Debatable.
- So aspect.
What does this go for?
- It's like 35-40 grand.
- 35-40 grand.
- [Colin] Somewhere in there.
- Which raises the question,
why does a machine like this cost, like it does?
Most purchasers of something like this,
would be using it to make money.
And there's just a higher tolerance
for cost when it comes to money making machines.
And as everyone knows, money equals time.
So it comes down to what features it has,
that makes it faster, and easier to use.
And that's where things like that fourth axis come in.
I mean, being able to work on multiple sides of a part
without going in and painstakingly,
moving things around, and rezeroing,
that's money (cash register chime) right there.
Of course, for us, that's not really the plan.
We're just gonna use it to like,
make cool stuff for our videos.
I guess we should do a demo, right?
- [Colin] Ya, let's make some chips.
- Okay. Well, first thing: safety!
(doors clanging)
Should never be run (knocks) without that closed,
and you guys are gonna see why,
in just a moment here.
So this is cool.
It uses like, an air blast to clean (machine hisses)
off the tool before it puts it back in the tool changer.
So which one should I use to hack up that aluminum block?
- [Colin] They're all good for doing that.
- Okay. So what do I-
- [Colin] So now if you use the arrow keys on the keyboard,
you're gonna jog.
Up and down is page up page down.
- That's really user friendly.
(mumbling)
Now you might think, wow, gee,
you're gonna run out of coolant pretty fast there, Rick,
but it all collects in this little filtered reservoir
on the bottom, and then it recirculates it.
Now, normally we wouldn't have it
in like flood mode like this for making videos,
but that's where the mister comes in.
I'm not gonna plunge it straight into the thing.
- [Colin] I don't trust you, man.
- Come on, Colin, give me a little credit!
- [Colin] I mean, technically it's your machine.
- [Linus] Oh, there it goes boys!
See you later, metal!
Look at them metal shards at the back
Ladies and gentlemen!
- [Colin] You wanna clean it up?
We got tools for that Linus.
- Ah! Sprayed me.
How many thou is this thing accurate to?
- [Colin] I mean, I haven't dialed it yet.
I think the spec is 2/10 of a 'thou'
to 4/10 of a 'thou'?
- It's like, there's no burns, there's just,
it's not even wet.
It's like (machine noise with mouth)
- [Colin] Because it's non-porous, you made a clean surface
so you can blow literally all the coolant off of it.
- We switch the plugs in the back,
We are now in misting coolant mode.
Here comes a misty boy-
- [Colin] Do you wanna position it?
- Just the tip!
- [Colin] And only for a second.
- And only what?
- [Colin] Nevermind!
- Oh, wow. That's pretty wimpy, isn't it?
- It's called minimum quantity lubrication.
So it's just enough coolant to keep things moving.
If you need something to be, say clean,
you can run clean fluids,
rather than a recirculating coolant,
or you can have a different one in your mister,
versus what you have in your flood coolant.
It can get fancy.
- Oh, my god!
Like, somehow it's both perfect and not sharp,
nothing quite like a brand new machine
running brand new bits, eh?
- [Colin] Why that finish is so good,
is because when you plow a tool through a part,
it's gonna naturally deflect,
and the router, it's just so big,
it can't be rigid.
This little tool, it's a lot denser,
and a lot heavier.
So it deflects less, and you get a better finish.
- Ya it's absolutely incredible.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go back in time
and have a look at our commissioning video for the router.
That was quite the adventure for Alex way back in the day.
(beep)
Oh, wait. These are both mini PCIE, what the f--- (beep)
Okay (laughs)