I have an electronics company and I’m looking for a way to do some aluminum enclosures for prototypes for cheap. I’m ok with it taking a long time to run so long as I know the machine will handle it. My tolerance are not very tight. We’ll just drop a PCBA in there and epoxy it closed.
Is the X-Carve something that will work for this application? Here’s an example enclosure.Enclosure.PDF (77.9 KB)
Render of the enclosure plus a PCBA.
And follow up. Would anyone out there want to do a job and make a couple for me to prove out the process.
Hi Jared,
What CAD program are you using for the designs?
If your only planning on doing smallish aluminum work, the 1000 doesn’t make sense. The smaller machine will be more rigid.
What do you recommend?
I thought Inventables just dropped all but the 1000 mm version?
@JaredTabb: The X-Carve could do what you’re wanting, but it’d be pretty slow going. I usually keep my depth per pass around 0.005" for aluminum, so milling out 15 mm over a roughly 3" x 6" are would take… …awhile… You’d also be eating brushes up pretty quickly at that rate.
I’d recommend looking for a more purpose-built machine. Something smaller and more rigid, as @NeilFerreri1 mentioned, would definitely give you better results.
