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  • Author Author: ralphjy
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Genmitsu CNC 3018-PRO - becoming useful

ralphjy

I had a minor victory on my road to figuring out how to use my new CNC router.

 

I received the 0.5mm carbide end mills that I bought on Amazon and used one to successfully shorten a proto PCB that I need for my LoRaXes project.  The mill has about 4 mm of cutting depth.  The PCBs that I'm cutting are nominally around 1.6 mm thick.  Not a very impressive looking cutter but it worked.  I increased the spindle speed to 3000 RPM and reduced the feedrate to 80 mm/min and set the cutting depth to 0.15 mm per pass.

 

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Here is the shortened PCB next to one that is uncut:

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The cut edges are very smooth but you can see that they are not quite straight.  Not sure if I can improve that with tweaking or if that's the inherent limitation of an inexpensive router and cheap end mills.  Only time and experience will tell.  Anyway, I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome.  The tool did what I needed it to do. 

  • I originally got a CNC mill (well, converted a mill myself) in order to mill PCBs. I ended up moving to etching as milling anything smaller than SOIC starts to get impractical.

    https://0xfred.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/proxxon-mf70-cnc-mill-conversion/

     

    CNC milling is great. It complements 3D printing really well. I still do it, just not for PCBs.

  • I would be interested in finding out more about CNC milling and similar as I know virtually nothing. One of my goals for it would be to surface mill PCB layouts rather than etch. We did have one at work that could do this but it was slow so not useful for larger class batches of PCBs, but now, slow would be fine for just me. It feels a bit like when I started with 3D printing, as they had one at work (just for the mechanical engineers) that printed in wax and cost nearly £100,000 - not much use to me for my electronics stuff. Eventually they became much cheaper, printed in plastic and I understood what was going on (mostly). Now I would like to do something similar with CNC. My wife has already said no to the £30,000 CNC lathe, so I'm looking for something much cheaper.

     

    Dubbie

  • Welcome on the CNC world image Do you plan to use it for PCB only or also something else? What kind of model? Some photos? If you need help, just ask.

     

    BTW... Maybe it is worth to open a group on CNC milling techniques, eventually finalized to the electronic design and prototyping support?

     

    Enrico

  • Welcome to the world of CNC. It's fun, isn't it? You may know this already, but PCBs are particularly may to cut. They will blunt your endmills and the dusty is abrasive and nasty.

     

    For that particular job I'd have used a beefier endmill - maybe 2mm or more. You'll get less flex and you're less likely to snap it. Actually, for that job I probably wouldn't have used a CNC mill, but I'm guessing you really want to find your way round your new toy!