Now, while for the most part it fits together without hardware, the adjustable keyboard rack does require the drilling of the holes. After figuring out how to get poor 'ol CamBam (free version) to drill holes (and testing this), I started the program.
It started out ok, but then by the third hole it started generating a good deal of smoke. It took lots of experimenting with feed rates, pecking, and other such stuff to figure out what was going on: I was trying to drill holes with a downcut bit.
For the non-machinists out there, allow me to explain: your standard drill bit is what's called an upcut bit, that is the spiral flutes of the bit will bring chips up to the top of the bit. This is good for high-speed cutting, where you have to worry about keeping the bit clear. However, the drawback to using upcut bits in a CNC router is that it will cause the face of your material to chip and break near the cut, especially if you're working on a laminate material like plywood. For this reason I bought downcut bits, where the flutes of the bit spiral the other way. This eliminates chipping on the face, but has other drawbacks, such as not being good at drilling holes. What was happening to me is that the MDF dust created by the bit was being kept down in the hole where it was compressed and rubbed against itself a high speed, causing it to burn. To fix this, I changed the program so that I'd only drill shallow holes, the plan being to take the pieces over to the drill press and finish them after they were cut out.
Just before I was going to start cutting the actual pieces out, suddenly everything shut off. Turns out someone in the wood shop next to me blew a fuse. To avoid this in the future I used an extension cord to plug into a different outlet. I thought nothing of this at the time, but it would haunt me the rest of the night. After that I could not get the machine to do what I wanted. It wouldn't always move when it was told, and nothing I did or changed seemed to help. At 11pm I decided to call it a night and went home.
I came in this morning and after implementing a clamping system I thought up to keep the workpiece from moving (we thought that perhaps this was causing some of the error), I got back to work.
As one would imagine, the same problem was still there, but this time I noticed that it seemed to be limited to the Y and Z motors. I checked the connections, moved cords around to avoid possible interference (even though they were shielded), but no dice. The most annoying thing was that it would work fine until I actually went to run a program. A stroke of luck finally showed me what was going on: I turned the router on and had the program start and then when I saw it was moving I turned on the shop vac. I look back to see that the Y motor had stopped moving right when I had hit the vac's switch. Remember when I changed outlets? Turns out the new one didn't supply the same amount of current as the old one, so the motors weren't getting enough juice when the router and vac were on as well.
They're now on a different circuit. Off to cutting!
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