7 months by cncdivi
Cheap and Cheerful Dust Control for Carbon Fiber Milling
Carbon Fiber is a neat material–extremely strong, lightweight, and gorgeous to look at. But it is not without its problems. As a composite material, it is very abrasive, and the dust it produces is hazardous to breath. For more about machining the stuff, read our series on Composites.
It’s all doable, but on a hobby class machine, the dust control can be a bit vexing. That is, unless you’re Apollo, one of Carbide3D’s founders. He shows how to machine carbon fiber by submerging it in a little container of water:
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Clever trick, Apollo!
Here’s the Reddit Link and the link back to Carbide3D’s Community.
Harbor Freight Dust Collector with Thien Disk Separator
Adding a cyclone or other dust separator to your dust collection system or Shop-Vac is a great upgrade that we’ve written about before. Here’s a neat installation done on a shop dust collection system:
Dust blower and separator-barrel…
Disc separator is super simple…
3D Printed Fallout Cosplay Helmet
Cosplay (DIY movie quality props) are always fun. This 3D printed helmet from the Fallout game came out looking spectacular:
Imagine showing up to a costume party in this rig!
Some great tips in the article too. For example, using iron filings to achieve the finish on the helmet.
Free Tutorial on Workholding
Sometimes you find gold in the comments of an unrelated post. I found a link to Enerpac’s School of Workholding. It’s a great set of articles on Fixturing.
CNC’d Business Cards for a CNC Business
How best to communicate your CNC business’s capabilities? Perhaps by CNC’ing your business cards:
Laser printed business cards. They even come apart to make a little dollhouse-sized chair. Aren’t they neat?
Conclusion
These 5 were just the haul form one morning’s trawling. It’s not always this rich, but I do nearly always find something interesting to check out on Reddit. You’ll want to decide which groups (subreddits) to investigate. I generally hang out around 3DPRINTING, MACHINISTS, CNC, HOBBYCNC, SHAPEOKO, CNCMACHINING, MACHINING, and DIYCNC.
Enjoy!
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Bob is responsible for the development and implementation of the popular G-Wizard CNC Software. Bob is also the founder of CNCCookbook, the largest CNC-related blog on the Internet.
Bob;
Just a caution about the dust collector system on your last blog post. There is a site by Bill Pentz, http://billpentz.com/woodworking/cyclone/index.cfm where he suggests that dust collectors like what you showed, give a false and dangerous sense of security.
I found Bill’s site while researching a dust collector system to remove the smoke particles from welding. He relates how he set up a system like that in his woodworking shop and after having dust related health issues learned that the problem particles are not the ones you see but the ones you don’t see and are so small (less than 3 microns) they will pass through the kind of systems you show and these are the ones the EPA says will cause the most problems.
Please have your readers visit Bill’s site, he shows how to build a better system, doesn’t charge for the plans and let’s you know the limitations of the system. I don’t have any interest in Bill’s site, just learned a lot from it and would like your readers to be safe..
LaVerne
LaVerne, thanks for writing. I took a gander at Bill’s site, and there does seem to be some good info there. One thing to note about the system pictured is it exhausts to the outdoors. That makes all the difference. Bill offers HEPA filters for those that can’t exhaust the smaller particles outside.
Cheers,
BW