Yeah. The language used to teach 6.01. I keep putting semicolons on the end of everything and bracketing random things!
It’s a totally different thought paradigm from the likes of JavaC+++Script.
So I found out that the aluminum plate I cut the arm pieces from was actually .515″. Odd, but whatever. The arm links ended up being ~1/16″ wider than they were supposed to be, which messed with fitting things. So the solution was to plane down the links in the milling machine the next time I was in the Media Lab.
That sounded so simple. Anyways, here’s a picture of things that are supposed to be .500 +/- .003 but are not.
Yeah. That’s pretty damned inaccurate, but at least the mill is consistent in the thousandths digit. Fortunately, the thickness of the arm itself is a rather noncritical dimension.
I hate ill-maintained flakey public tools. I don’t even understand how things got fucked up this badly. Seriously, .465 on a part that’s supposed to be a half inch? Dialing in .015 seems to mean .005 to .025.
Something was tilted the wrong way also. That .465 part was .510 at the other end (about 12 inches).
If you had to pick between these two milling machines:
a) Huge old-skool Bridgeport, super smooth with DRO, but 1 good vise, no clamping kits, no parallels, no drill chuck, no edge finders, nor apparently the ability to change speeds, and about 10 minutes walk away
or
b) Shaky Taiwanese import mill-drill. Great tool selection, but shitty vise, backlash measured in miles, a Z-axis that goes Tokyo Drift at will (as pictured) , a clamped round-column that likes to move side-to-side, cheap vise, half a clamping kit, but across the street?
…which would you choose?
Man, if I could jack the ML’s milling tool bucket and have nobody notice, I’d totally take the Bridgeport. In fact, it’s so smooth and huge that I can’t use Ghettoedging because the massive amount of cast iron dampens the tool noises so much.
Oh well. Now that my giant slabs of aluminum have arrived, I’ll recut the arm pieces. 2024 precision ground is better than .515″ 6061.
.515… that’s such a weird thickness, isn’t it?