Moving back to the plate parts again after shipping out the Delrin pieces, I need to mill out a couple of challenging features on the tall edges, proving to be an interesting challenge!
One of these large flat parts' interesting and difficult features is that they need threaded holes on the sides of the 0.5" plates. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, and I could just set it up in the vice upright. However, the problem is that they extend longer than the z-height can reach.
I will be doing these plates by setting up a large flat square directly on the mill's surface whose face will sit flush with the backside of the X-Y table. Setting the square at the back, I can let the part hang on to a flat face while reaching below the table itself. It's a bit difficult to put into words, but I will show visuals next week on the process.
One of the plate parts I finished up today was a half-circle that needed counter-bored holes on the arc's surface. This wasn't as difficult as I initially thought it would be to do and only took me a few minutes to program the operation. I was able to set it up on long jaws.
Since there's no flat surface on it, I was initially thrown off on how you would find the center and top of the part. Thankfully I was able to use a web probing cycle (the tool moves in a pattern to find the center of two different points by moving out, down, inward, then repeats on the other side and moves to the difference of those numbers)