I was able to get the first design iteration of the dovetail workholding vice for the Pocket NC finished up and rendered yesterday and announced publicly that I would be releasing this product! I'm honestly shocked at the feedback I got back so quickly after posting it on the Facebook and Instagram groups for the Pocket NC users. I've got several people who sound interested, and I should have gotten my email list ready to go for potential customers to sign up for before announcing it. 

On Monday, I sent out a quick survey to the Pocket NC groups asking a few questions about the workholding systems people are using but got minimal responses from that, and I was unsure how the announcement would go. I definitely think the visual really helps get a good idea of what my product will look like and its possibilities. 

I also came up with a name for my new workholidng system, Duif Workholding (duif meaning dove, or pigeon in Dutch, referring to the dovetail clamp system). I also created a new Instagram account dedicated to this new brand and commissioning a logo from Fiverr! 

I spent 2:47:00 yesterday working on this project (timed myself), which brings the total to 4 hours and 17 minutes. I only have 15:43:00 remaining within 28 days before shipping out the first iteration of this product. Starting the project is really putting it in perspective just how much work goes into product launches, and doing it in the 20 hours is definitely going to be a challenge!

I absolutely love every minute I'm working on this project and cannot wait to launch it officially!

Here is a copy of the announcement I posted to the groups:

I’m super excited to announce that I will be releasing a brand new dovetail workholding for the Pocket NC, Duif Workholding!

I’ve been coming up with the design for this project for quite some time now and cannot wait to share some of the features it will have! 

The beauty of this vice system is that it has a base plate with a groove in the center to allow for multiple dovetail sizes and other workholding capabilities (to be announced later). Making it extremely easy to set up and get the machine running quickly! 

There are many vice systems out there on the market, but the primary issues with the designs are that they aren’t designed for ease of use or don’t provide enough workholding strength to hold your part. My goal with the Duif Workholding is to have a low profile design, with little setup required and maximum stability.

Dovetail workholding is some of the best ways of gripping your stock out there and gives plenty of rigidity while milling out your parts. It only grips on to a small portion of the material, but the angled edge allows for a fantastic amount of strength. 

This project is still in the design phase and will officially launch in about a month! I’m absolutely ecstatic about this project and cannot wait to start on prototypes and testing! 

Ps. My goal is to create the best all-around workholding system, and I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on the design!

Got the skateboard truck parts all proofed out and load stock in and walk away while it does its thing, so I started working on re-organizing the fixturing and pins drawer. 

Nothing special, just putting together sets of tools and organizing them. My boss uses one interesting technique for keeping small pins and screws to use old endmill boxes. It’s perfect for holding many different sizes separate while taking up little space to do so. 

Re-organizing these drawers was quite tedious, but it feels nice now that everything is in its proper order and makes finding tools much more accessible. 

The Haas VF3 is also having some weird issues with tool probing repeatability. My boss was testing it the other day and found his work lost from improper tool heights, and the strange thing is that it doesn’t repeat; each time he probes the tool, he gets a different result. Typically within two thou of each other, I’ll be re-calibrating the Reinshaw tool probe tomorrow and see if that somehow fixes the issue.

I'm super excited to start a new venture and challenge myself to developed and launch a product intentionally with a plan!

Quick backstory, I've been reading quite a few business books lately, which is getting me super excited to further my knowledge in developing and marketing a product from start to finish. My goal is to launch the first iteration of my product in twenty hours of work and less than $300 in cost, thinking about the design not included, but any research does. The product I am designing and launching is a new workholding system for the Pocket NC, and my goal is to sell at least five of them within a month from now at a price that would match what it would go on the market for (basically not selling it at or below cost.)

I've been mulling around a specific design for some time now and got most of the problems figured out and think it can be a viable product to sell. Since there aren't many Pocket NC owners out there, I can't imagine I can get more than five people buying it, but I want to try and get at least that many to invest in it. 

The primary books I am using to launch the product is "The First 20 Hours" by Josh Kaufman, and "Launch" by Jeff Walker. There are other books that I will be working off, but those two are the main ones. 

My game plan will go as follows:

1) Come up with a quick design outlining the unique features of the product

2) Create a new Instagram and email newsletter, start publishing free content, and slowly mention the new product to get emotional buy-in. 

3) Develop the product more and start sharing the benefits of it through other content creators as well as myself. 

4) Create a website and product page and set up a time counter for when it gets released. 

5) Start marketing the product through my list and Instagram and have limited units for sale. 

6) Launch the product and include an additional item they weren't expecting in the package gift-wrapped.

I can easily spend months on this project and get nowhere, so I am limiting my time and money to spend it on what matters to get this product out into the world. I also have a one-month time frame to ship out the first iteration of the product. Thus far, I have put in about 1.5 hours in research and some communication with other users. I am not going to include my writeup on the journey through it but will consist of the time spent on emails for my list/promotional posts. 

I also do not plan on posting my experience on Instagram, but only my blog, as I do not want it to affect how my little experiment goes. Plus, it may generate more traffic to my website as a byproduct if people are interested. 

In the next post, I will outline what features the product will have and share the first basic design I come up with to tease possible customers. 

Super excited to finish the program up for the skateboard trucks today, and I had some new insights on machining techniques for simultaneous machining.

The changes I made to this new program was adding the swarf toolpath to both sides of the lower half of the trucks, I was able to leave approximately ten thou total as a web between the part and the stock, and it had quite a bit of rigidity. I switched up my final cut from being at the bottom half of the truck to the upper half where there was a flat, and I could take a few small 2D passes to cut away all but a thou or two, making it easy to break off. 

I noticed pretty quickly that the swarf toolpaths were leaving some pretty bad marks on the surface of the part, and that made the cleanup quite painful. It looks as if the tool is deflecting pretty bad and jumping around as its cutting. The odd thing is that there is almost no sound when it's milling, and the stepdowns are pretty small at five thou per. I talked to my boss, and he suggested to rough it out first, leaving one or two thou on the walls and then taking a single finishing pass at full depth, which I will try out tomorrow.

I'm also getting some weird results with the ball endmill when cleaning up the slight radius' on the top and sides of the part. I'm climb milling with a 0.09" ball endmill and only cutting three thou in height, but it's leaving a rough finish sort of like light sandpaper. It's not that big of a deal, and I'm able to clean it up with a few passes of scotch bright but still is concerning me why it's happening at all. 

I was hoping to get these skateboard trucks done by the end of the day but ended up running into some more issues.

Since the part was nearing completion, my boss instructed me to fill the backside with a casting material to hold it in place while cutting it out of the base with a tapered ball endmill. It all worked as it should, and the part popped out several minutes later. However, I didn't consider that since I was cutting it with a ball endmill from both sides, it would leave a rather large cusp that would have to get removed later. Since this was the setup piece anyway, I didn't mind messing it up as it would go in my collection. 

Since I didn't want to deal with spending the time to remove that stock on the other parts, I decided to go about cutting the piece out in a different manner, namely, a swarf toolpath. A swarf toolpath is a full simultaneous 5-axis motion that is guided by two points, similar to a contour toolpath, but you need the center guiding one as well as a brace for the side of the tool to follow. I was a little nervous about doing this before because I wasn't sure how the VF2 would take it, and my boss mentioned he had issues where the brake would turn on and off while trying to move.

I got the second part up and running and tested out the swarf toolpath with my finger resting on the stop button. It turned out amazing, and I'm ecstatic about how well it worked! I plan to completely cut off the lower base of the part and take my finishing pass to break it loose from the stock at the top where the wings are. The reason for cutting it off at the top is because it's one of the only locations that require a single contour pass to finish off, and makes it easier to clean up any possible marks. There are also some small finishing passes I'm going to change to get a more seamless transition between tools. 

I goofed again when finishing the second part and somehow ran and stopped a probing cycle for my 1/4" square endmill and ended up ruining the second truck as well. Thankfully the program is mostly proven, and I can pick it up first thing Monday and get them all finished by the end of the day. 

I talked about how frog legs are considered a delicacy in China, but that was more from the scarcity of them. When they had the opportunity to have frog legs, they enjoyed every moment of it even though they aren't the best tasting food out there by a long shot. I said that a little known fact was that toad legs were even more enjoyable and should be considered above frog legs.

From my self-evaluation, I think I did pretty decent on the hand gestures and excitement, but the actual content was all over the place and could have organized my thoughts better. 

This group is a different one from last week's as it meets more frequently (every week, vs. every other week). The members were excellent and clear, and I was able to take notes of what I thought they did well (to work on my speeches) and comments others made. They didn't have quite the same format as the previous one, and so didn't review each table topic speech afterward.

I am finally in the finishing stages of making the skateboard trucks, and I am incredibly pleased with the results I am getting!

I'd say that 90% of the time I've spent on this part has been trying to understand and testing out different toolpaths to see what would work the best, and the other 10% is creating the usable program. I initially used a ton of 3D adaptive toolpaths to clear out the material around the part. Still, after looking at some of the run times on the smaller endmills, I switched over to using the 3D pocket clearing method. 

One huge time saver I found in Fusion that's helped with testing out different ways of milling is the "Create Derived Toolpath," which you can find found when you right-click the operation. What this does is it copies over all your existing settings to the new toolpath. For instance, let's say you have a 3D adaptive, and you have it at a specific orientation with a bounding box selected. Instead of going through all those settings again (includes cutting parameters), you can create a derived toolpath like a 3D pocket clearing with all the same settings copied over. 

I'm now in probably the third or fourth iteration of my program and very pleased with my results so far. Thankfully these parts don't have a specific deadline, so my boss encouraged me to take my time and get things right, which has been super helpful with finding ideal workflows and creating templates for future projects. The fantastic thing about this piece is that I can reference it from here on out with other 5-axis and similar parts that might have unique features that are difficult to machine. This is the most prolonged period, and most mistakes I will make on this type of piece; there will be other difficulties, but I've gotten a good majority of them figured out. 

The last thing I need to do with this part before it's finished is cut it off its base, which I will do tomorrow with a 1/4" ball endmill. The flat from one end of the base to the other is tapered, so I have to use a ball endmill to take very small stepdowns to finish and remove the web simultaneously. I'll be backfilling the opposite end with clay to prevent any vibrations while it's cutting the aluminum away.

Whew, today was quite a day of frustration and learning!

I started by doing some more research into adding a homing sequence before each tool change to prevent the arm from crashing into the 5-axis trunnion. Originally my plan of action was to add it directly into the post-processor in Fusion360 so that I wouldn't have to remember to add the gcode manually. 

Just reading some of the tutorials, I found online for editing post-processors made me come to realize just how out of my league that was for my current understanding of it. I found the handbook by Autodesk on editing and making your post processors. However, the information was quite extensive, and there was virtually no way I could write in my custom code without spending quite a few hours understanding the terminology. 

Instead, I decided to look up how to program in the homing sequence directly on the machine. Haas has a tutorial on adding a custom process for what I was looking for with the trunnion avoidance. There are macros you can program on the controller to execute any code you like in a sub-operation. It uses M codes with whatever code you choose, and if the number already has a preset assigned to it, your macro automatically overrides the default machine preset. For instance, an M06 code is a tool change; if you input a T1 M06, it will call up tool #1 and change it out with whatever is in the spindle. If I add a macro for M06, I can perform any action I choose, in this case, my unique homing sequence before changing the tools out. This sub-program is an IF-THEN process; IF the code reads an M06 in the G-code, THAN will perform the function outlined. 

So my code ran to replace the M06 with a Home Z, A, B, X, & Y-axis in that order. Then you come into the problem of, what now? You replaced the M06 operation with your new sequence, and if you put an M06 line right after the axis moves, it will just repeat the whole program all over again forever. Thankfully Haas thought of this and created a secondary tool change code called M16, which does the same thing as the M06. And finally, you need to return the program to the operation it was going through; if not, it would stop when it finished the subprogram, and nothing would happen. That's where the M99 code comes in; this is a "now you're finished, you can continue along your journey like normal."

I kept getting errors when I tried running the program on its own and said the M16 was an unknown/undefined tool. I didn't realize that the M06 and M16 were purely a "swap tools out" program and needed a defined tool to change it out of. Thankfully when I ran a specific tool and then the tool change code it all worked out exactly like I wanted. 

It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to edit the macros and I ended up calling the Haas applications department to figure out how to do it properly. 

I'm running the skateboard truck parts today, and it was quite a learning experience. 

I double and triple checked over each aspect of my program before running anything to ensure I didn't crash the machine. And my boss instructed me to run the VF2 at 5% rapid and 50% feedrate with my finger hovering the feed hold button to catch any possible errors.

I'm happy I did too because once I roughed out most of the material, I had a pretty close call. What happened was the trunnion angled at 120deg, this meant that the backside is higher than the rest of the 5-axis addition, in such a way that when the spindle carriage came down, it would smash into it before the endmill could touch the stock. The solution was to use a more extended tool holder, which I ended up doing and got a few extra inches of reach. Even with a 7" extension from the spindle (I had 3" previously), it came too close to hitting the trunnion, and I was not very comfortable with that. Since the cutter was hanging so far out, the vibrations of the endmill would be so violent to such a degree that it would require a very long cutting operation (taking super small stepdowns with very slow feedrates to prevent any marring of the surface.) 

After discussing it with my boss, he suggested a much easier way to clear out that cavity and shorten the run time significantly. He said to use keyseat cutters (aka keyway cutter) to cut along the flat faces, allowing perfectly flat surfaces in a single toolpath. Previously I planned to rough it out with a large square endmill, then come in and finish it with a smaller ball cutter, with the runtime being upwards of 16 minutes for the whole setup. Using keyseat cutters, I could simultaneously remove the material and finish the grooves simultaneously with a radiused corner tool, and runtime would only take five minutes. Doing it this way, I didn't have to reach any sketchy angles as I would cut side to side instead of up and down, so my 120deg angle turned into 30deg! I ran it and am quite shocked at how good the results were!

Once I finished the sketchy cut, I was just about to let it do the tool change and move on to the next toolpath. However, I noticed the trunnion was still at that very steep angle, and if I went through with it, the extended tool holder would collide with the a-axis bed. Once again, I was am glad I had my finger over the feed hold button and prevented a major disaster! I never really realized it before, but when doing the tool changes, it raises the z-axis as it should. Still, it doesn't home the A and B axis, it usually wouldn't be an issue, but if you had to work on weird angles, it becomes a massive issue, one that you can't ignore. The solution, of course, was to add a homing sequence to the beginning of each tool change. 

I wasn't entirely sure how to do this to make it easy to add the code to my future programs and went first to the post-processor to see if I could figure out where to edit it. I wasn't able to find what I was looking for from looking at the straight code, so I just googled it to see if it was a common problem. I found a few posts of edits people made to their post-processors but nothing for my situation. The next best thing was to manually add the code in the Manual NC section of Fusion360 CAM; I could type in the G-code for the homing sequence. The neat thing about this is that it acts like a toolpath in the sense that it's got a moveable tab where you can line it up in between operations or before tool changes. The downside is that it is it's own unit, meaning you have to add it in each time manually, and doesn't do it by default. It's more of a hassle thing than anything else. My goal is to program it directly into the post-processor so I won't have to remember to add it to each program. 

Setting up the 5axis CAM system setup on the Haas VF2 today!

5-Axis work is still pretty new to me, and I've only had experience in it on my Pocket NC, which, as I'm learning very quickly, is quite different. I set up the softjaw fixture my boss made a few years back to hold my stock in place on the B-axis bed of the trunnion and dialed the rotation off the back edge of the dovetail vice. 

Before running the entire program, I wanted to test it out to ensure everything was lined up correctly and avoid crashes. I'm very glad I did this as when I went running a basic facing operation, the spindle went to the back corner, and if I weren't there to stop it, it would have crashed into the 5-axis trunnion. The interesting thing was that it was perfectly inverted; everything was in the correct locations just on the opposite side of where I wanted it to be. I looked around online a bit to see if it was a common problem and couldn't find any information on everything being in the wrong place, there were instances of the a-axis turning the wrong direction, but those were only one of the axis. 

I decided to re-download the post-processor Fusion360 had for Haas machines and repost the code without making any changes. It turns out that was the primary solution; however, now the a-axis was on the wrong side (wasn't before), and it would cut the material with the base of the trunnion toward me, which would work, but I would have no supervision of what goes on. I remembered reading all those posts of people having similar issues, so I went back and followed the outlines they suggested. I opened up the post-processor code and found the section outlined; I then changed the parameters for the a-axis rotation to go in a positive direction instead of negative (rotating it +90deg instead of -90). Unfortunately, this didn't work, and spent a few hours trying to problem solve it. The quick and dirty way to fix the issue was to remove the minus sign in the posted G-code, but long term, I know that would cause significant problems if I forgot to do that. 

I finally figured out what the problem was; in the post-processor program where I was trying to change the negative to a positive, there was a true or false scenario right above it. If specific applications where applicable, then this subprogram goes into action; for example, if John eats an apple, he will have one less apple; if John does not eat an apple, then he will have the same amount of apples. The true or false is reliant on if John ate the apple if he didn't, then nothing happens, but if he does, then the "subprogram" goes into action, in this case, he has one less apple, or FALSE = NOTHING, TRUE = (APPLES-1). The problem was that the sub-program is by default set to false, which is essentially an on/off switch for this whole section of the post-processor. And all I had to do was rewrite the FALSE into TRUE.

Once the post-processor was complete, I re-ran the facing toolpaths on the stock, and this time it went to the right locations and cut in the spot as programmed. I then measured the thickness of the stock (faced the front and back, should have been precisely 1.5") and found it to be four thou undersized (1.496"), which scared me quite a bit. I discussed it with my boss, and after thinking it over, I realized when I probed the tool height, I forgot that you needed to set the tool diameter to ensure that it was measuring the tip of the flutes and not the center of the tool. Because the inside of the endmill I was using had a cone-shaped dip in the center, it matched perfectly with the chamfer on the edge of the tool probe, thus measuring the tool lower than it would if it was only touching the very tip of the flutes. I re-probed the endmill and cut both faces again, and it came out +-0.0005," which is acceptable for this machine.