You may recognize the platform. Jason informs me that there’s still a lot of work to be done, as everything is not fitting together all that nicely at the moment. The first attempt was sacrificed to the gods of gravity, and a loose fitting. I guess it’s a good thing aluminum is fairly recyclable, and 1911s aren’t made out of the bones of endangered species, or something. Quite a lot of aluminum has been gone through on these projects that’s been sacrificed to FAIL. But he’ll have a nice collection of homemade guns when all is said and done, for sure.
For something non-gun Jason was machining, he made a time lapse video to show the progress. I thought that would be neat to do with a gun too, so I asked him. Below you’ll find the results of that:
I believe this is a frame that bolts together, which makes it easier to do on the mill.
Wow, that’s a lot of aluminium compared to what you end up with, but it’s hard to see any practical way to economize, either on material or bit wear.
The jump to plastic grips suddenly makes a lot more sense.
In aerospace manufacturing we refer to the amount of material you need to buy vs the amount of material in a finished part as the “buy-to-fly ratio”.
Its like most any machining.. start with a chunk of metal, and cut away everything that isnt the gun :)
He might have been able to make side 2 reversed on the same plat if he got a tad longer billet (nesting is the term). But Im not familiar with its capabilities, looks like the X and Y axis were tight.
I tried, but no matter how I arranged the two halves I couldn’t quite get it all to fit within the x-y limits of the machine.
Wow. That work is done with just an end mill? And no cutting fluid? Times have changed.
Pretty much, but it’s also just aluminum. I think he’d need fluid to do steel, and his setup doesn’t handle fluid.
I’ll let Jason know people are commenting, but I think we’re getting pretty close to Passover, so he’s going to be on holiday for a bit.
I take cuts no deeper than 0.01 inches at 30ipm and 10500 rpm. At that high rpm most of the chips get thrown clear of the work, so as long as I’m not doing a deep pocket I can just let it run unattended even without flood coolant. It takes a while, but since I don’t have to babysit the machine while its running I don’t mind.