By brianc4, Section Wind Posted on Fri May 30th, 2008 at 11:20:02 PM MST
My Axial Flux Mill With CNC Flat Plate Construction
Here is the machine that makes most of my wrought iron & artwork possible. It is a great time saver & I dont know how I lived for 40 years without one!!
That being said lets get on topic. I really appreciate all of the engineering information posted about the 10' axial flux machines on this site & have seen some wonderfull creations constructed from tubing. However I wanted to take advantage of of the speed & accuracy of my plasma cutter. So using all of the great information presented on this site I converted the construction of the mill to a flat plate design. Here is the first piece, the yaw baseplate that will hold the only tube part on the mill the main spindle.The spindle is offset 5" from centerline of yaw axis & skewed 10 deg. off of perpendicular of yaw axis to give more blade clearance to the tower. Which duplicates what I have seen done with the tube construction design. Here is the stub axle with spacer washers installed slipped into spindle tube & ready to be fillet welded & plug welded. Here is my Dad, Larry welding up the spindle assembly.FYI its a real pain trying to take a picture with a digital camera thru a welding helment! Here is a good shot of the magnet rotors being cut. Once again hard to take a good picture of such a bright light especially with dark glasses on! Here is a good shot of the control booth of the pattern room. Its it is heated & air conditioned and has a big soft office chair (Dad's Side) My side is the one with all the heat sparks flame and smoke, not sure how that happened something about Dad having already paid his dues. Here is a screenshot of the CNC Control Software. It carries the Torchmate Logo but it is actually Fashcut CNC program & very easy to use. Here are the Rotor blanks cut out of 3/8" mild steel and ready for finish machining. Here I am putting all the holes on size. There is always some plasma lean to the cut so I always leave the holes an 1/8 undersize when possible, a 1/6" would be more than adequate to get rid of the plasma lean but that puts you out on the very edge of the drill bit, drilling thru a tapered hole in glass hard slag, drill bits don't like that at all! Here I am getting ready to tap the holes for the jacking bolts. I bought that trick tapping handle that fits in the drill press a few years ago and havn't broke a tap since unless it was dull. I got it from Wholesale Tool if anyone is interested in one. Here I have the front magnet rotor on the spindle hub to put some nice divits in the front of the hub for the ends of the jacking bolts to ride in during assembly. This is actually out of sequence I put the divits in before I tapped the holes. Here is the completed spindle ready to be welded to the yaw baseplate. Here the spindle is bolted to the yaw baseplate. Again I dulpicated what I have seen on this site putting the spindle axis up 5 deg. to gain more blade clearance. Here is a picture of the backside of the spindle hub after a quick trip thu the lathe to true it up. Here is the spindle assembled with the magnet Rotors & the Blade Hub. Belive it or not all work to this point was done in a 9 hour period during the memorial day weekend. Amazing what I can get done when I don't have customers under foot!
