Brian's HTMAA Diary 2024

Week 13: Wildcard

For Wildcard week, I chose to try out the 5-axis high speed maching.

The training session with Marcello ran into several problems. The first was that the collet got stuck and the TAs needed to spend some time troublshooting.

When we finally managed to calibrate the machine, put in some metal stock, and start a job, we ran into another problem: the drill bit got stuck into the stock.

On the second attempt, we ran into another problem. We turned the speed too high and ended up knocking the metal stock out of the vice grips and breaking the drill bit. The TA's decided to call it a day and continue tomorrow.

I wanted to try maching a hexagonal sphericon, so I CAD one up on Fusion.

Unfortunately, the object was not machinable because of a 20 degree limit with the axis.

At this point, Marcello recommended we complete the assignment in groups instead considering all the problems we ran into. I decided to group up with Kyle Horn, and we made a plan to take shifts machining a side of his circumscribed sphere, as each side took around 2 hours. However, my session kept getting pushed back as each person's assignment took longer than expected. By Monday afternoon, we decided to switch to Laser Micromachining.

I spent the session testing out the smallest resolution of text I could get, as I am thinking of laser micromachining a poem for my final project.