Hi Jason with Tormach. Today we're testing a fixture design. Specifically
how far can we push superglue as a workholding method. We have a real large
project coming up that is a thin wall organic shape and we wanted to test the
superglue method to see if it'd be a fast low-cost option to hold a part like
this. We came up with a sample part that has a real thin wall on it as well just
to test this theory. So let's jump into the cutting footage and go over the
details of our test part.We cut the inside of the part first we cut it right
to finish size and then we just went ahead and covered it with blue tape and
set it aside. For the fixture, we had to shrink the geometry the part by about 20
thousands of an inch to compensate for the thickness of the tape, and the glue.
And then we just cut the fixture there. You can see we covered it all in blue
tape as well. Then we just threw some glue on the part
and then we set it right on the fixture. I'm at a large piece of stock laying
around so I used that just to kind of tap the part on gently, and then I used
it as just weight on the part while the glue was curing. And then we're off to
the fun part, which is roughing. We went ahead and ran this on the conservative
side. I wanted to test the holding capacity of it but I also needed to make
sure it was a similar cut that we would be experiencing on the part we're making
down the road. So I kind of ran a similar parameter what I feel like it's gonna
work for me later. We ended up running it at a hundred thousand step the cut with
a two hundred thousand width of cut. And we ran this at 6,060 RPM
and 100 inches a minute. And everything ran great. The roughing went really well.
We were able to push it a little faster and then just everything held up, no part
movement, no chatter, or vibrations, or anything. It ran really well. I was really
happy with how they had worked out. In the future and everything I'll
definitely be willing to push on this a little harder to see how aggressively we
can machine using superglue as a workholding method. For finishing we used
a 16 millimeter inserted ball end mill. This was programmed at a 10,000 to
maximum depth the cut, but it used the scalloped height. So it calculates the scallop
height as it machines. So I had a maximum scalloped height of about 1/10 of a thousands.
We ran this at 7500 rpm at 45 inches a minute. We just really wanted to get a nice
surface finish and just really make this part shine so we we just dialed all the
step overs way down and just let this thing run a while.
Any time you're running finishing, you can see we did run this with flood
coolant, anytime you're doing a 3d profile on a part, it's always nice to
have flood to clear your chips and just to help wash the chips away to get a
better surface finish. So once this thing was all finished up...unfortunately I
didn't have the camera on when I took the part off the fixture, but what I
ended up doing was I used a heat gun and I just started warming the part up
evenly, and I just worked my way around it I just real lightly on the bottom
just started prying on it with a little block of wood just to kind of leverage
this thing off the fixture. And once I got it all warmed up evenly it lifted
right off Then I was able just to peel the tape right off the right off the
part right off the fixture without any problems.
Interestingly enough the superglue is stable up to 200 degrees but the blue
tape failed substantially sooner than that. I don't think we got the part much over a
hundred degrees and the the tape did start to loosen up and let go on
the adhesive. You know so kind of just teaches us that with this method we
definitely need to manage our heat if we start to get the part warm at all we're
gonna start to see that adhesion between the blue tape and the part fail before
we see that super glue let go. So just a consideration for using this in the
future. I have every reason to believe that we could go quite a bit thinner
with this workholding method I mean this didn't even give any indication of
chatter or that it was starting to fail. You know down the road I'd like to just
cut a couple these, you know, to see how thin we can make one just as a fun
little project or experiment. So you can see the part turned out pretty nice. I'm
real happy with the results. We got real nice surface finishes and we're able to
machine this down to about a sixty thousand wall thickness. So thanks for
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