While AL is probably sufficient, it is certainly not the preferred material. Ideally, some sort of hardenable steel would be used, I suppose, but most I have made are from mild steel. Some of the T-nuts I have bought over the years are hardened. Some are not.
Regardless of the material, make sure to peen the bottom of the threads so that the bolt/screw/threaded rod can’t be driven through into the bottom of the table. Many a t-slot has been broken out by somebody tightening the bolt into the bottom of the slot.
I wouldn’t expect corrosion to be a huge issue for these. If any cutting oil is used, they’ll get some on them. And they are being used in a (somewhat) controlled environment.
Well you take a ball pen hammer and some reckles tape, then with your drunt, you angle your inclination to match the raster. Tap the tharule with the hammer three or four times and then hast it.
I often do not tap through to the bottom when I don’t want the bolt to go past the part. Another option is distorting the thread with a center punch. I am curious what he means by peening the bottom, I might learn something new….
The aluminum t-nuts seemed to hold up pretty good for a test run tonight.
No metal ducky yet, but I’m getting a decent idea on how the machine works… And it’s definitely a work out trying to free hand surfacing a part.
It’s not a great surface finish, but I definitely think it would be wise to use a raised pattern to trace instead of trying to follow a line on a drawing.
Okay, one step closer to singing the aluminum ducky song…
It seemed to help to use a bull nose end mill instead of a standard end mill.
We still need to come up with some different diameter tracer pins to go with the same sized end mills.
Also, it’d definitely help to figure out a better way to hold down parts. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to mount whatever is bing copied to a carrier board to keep the form from moving.
This is pretty cool. One of the members (Ethan) took the manual milling class and then to get more practice in, he measured one of the Ts we had already made, created a 2D dimensioned drawing and made a copy of the T.
