Peck drilling with a smaller peck distance and slowing down the feed solved the drill breakage problem.

Original peck drilling: G83 G98 Z-2.12 Q.6 F19.0
Revised peck drilling: G83 G98 Z-2.2 Q.1 F9,5

With the revised peck drilling parameter, the spindle load is barely noticeable.

Completed 14 sets of aluminum cylinders for IORodeo's Pendulum sensor kit using the Haas TL-2 cnc lathe. The use of the gang tool allowed for the drilling and tapping operation to be completed with the lathe. A video of the process can be found on youtube.

Looking for an open source 3d cad solutions? IO Rodeo designed their water channel project using openscad and their py2scad python scripting plugin for openscad. Tux-Lab has the much simpler task of just machining a few parts. One of them was the pillow block mount.

The gcode was fairly simple and consist of three operations. Lesson learned was that a properl sized drill will be faster than using an endmill to mill the hole to size.

True to the hackerspace ethos, instead of buying one, Null Space Lab is building a laser cutter. Tasked with some of the machining, the journey begins. The first parts to be machined are the two linear rail mounts.

Step 1 - Tooling from Maritool, one of the best place to find US made tools at a great price.

Step 2 - Cut stock to size. . . .

Step 3 - Machine fixture for linear rail mounts.

Step 4 - Clamp stock to top of fixture and machine the counter sink holes.

Step 5 - Use the counter sink holes to fasten stock to fixture for drilling, tapping, and profiling. . . but forward progress stopped by two consecutive broken taps. . . to be continued. . .

The cavity has been cut and a test shot of the cavity was done using Cerritos College's plastic injection machine. The next step is to machine the ejector assembly.