I'm back on the rocket project today, cutting the final operation on one of the batches of anodized plates!
Throughout my time working on this project, I've run into a series of odd height issues that I could not for the life of me figure out what was causing it. I would get certain parts of the plate with low points, which would leave a faded look to the cut causing me to lower the endmill until it completely cut the top face. This really isn't ideal as each time I have to lower the cut, the smaller the rocket stand gets, which makes a looser fit when putting everything together.
My boss happened to be walking by a few days ago when he noticed I was clamping down quite hard on the mitee-bite fixture screws (off-center screws that revolve a hex-shaped bolt to apply pressure to the side when tightened). What I didn't realize was that you don't need all that much torque on those screws, and I was actually bowing the aluminum plate upward, giving it an arc in the center. Though slight, it was enough to get warped further when it got flipped over and cause issues.
There isn't anything I can do to fix these anodized plates except creeping up on the desired height, but there shouldn't be an issue for the next batch of plates.
I realize that there really doesn't need to be that amount of force needed to clamp down on material, and tooling and over-doing things cause a lot of stress, which could get released later in a catastrophic way.
A few weeks back, my father mentioned adding the rocket formula to get into space and add that to the underside of the rocket baseplate. I got to try out a quick engraving and found an online vector image, which worked out beautifully!