At first i was just going to purchase a cheap shop vac, but now I’m settled on a nice little 1hp dust collector with a hepa filter that will be dedicated to the x-carve, and I will also use a dust deputy cyclone with it. I am also going to make an enclosure for mine. Sounds like you’re quite the machinist!
I started out a little over a yer ago having never touched a CNC mill or worked in CAD before. I spent the last 20 or so years as a professional sports photographer. I was on staff for 18+ years at a major daily newspaper and have shot for the NBA and NFL and many others. I still shoot most weekends and I spend more time in hotels than I do at home most months. But I am pulling back from that and doing more milling work. I own a few CNC mills and will be adding a Tormach 770 in a few months. Right now the income from milling is fast approaching the income from sports works. With milling I get to enjoy being home each weekend all nice and warm. With sports work i am traveling 4 days a week and often pretty cold this time of the year. I have been very lucky that my wife works for NASA as an engineer and we have recently moved to Huntsville, AL. for her work. We have found a nice market here for milling jobs that most larger shops turn down due to small run size or being in carbon fiber which most shops try to avoid. That along with my work on custom milled 3D printer parts and custom FPV carbon fiber frames is doing very well for us as a smaller micro-manufacturing / rapid prototyping shop set up. We also do a fair bit of work for photo and video clients on custom mounts and such for production work. If things keep going this way, I will be able to stop traveling for sports work every weekend before the end of the year. I just seem to be lucky that CAD and CAM make sense to me and I am able to produce those designs by milling and 3d printing and I have been lucky enough to find a few nitche markets which needed those skills. Currently we have products in 20+ states and around the world in 8+ countries. Not bad for a sports photographer turned CNCer in under a year.
I can tell you that making your mill enclosed will be one of the best things you will do for it in the long run. Aside from keeping all the swarf inside of course, it does a great deal to cut down on milling noise also. I am still surprised just how much it cuts the noise each time I open my enclosure while the mill is cutting… I tend to forget just how big of a difference it makes. I wish you luck on the carbon fiber milling! It is a great stock to work with once you get the dust under control.
Thanks man! I wish you luck too!
A rags to riches CNC story. Very cool. Looking forward to seeing the Tormach up and running.
@Travelphotog
Thanks for all the info about speeds and the destiny viper recommendation, I ended up getting this project done, and despite a few hiccups it came out great! For information the part is an adapter plate for a research high vacuum system, it simply adapts two different brands of flange to each other with two separate bolt circles and an o-ring gland. The pockets milled for the inset bolts went great, with a mirror finish and I probably could have went much faster and deeper. The big center hole and O-ring gland however the bit got gummed up and I had to slow the feed waaay down as it did that big circle. The bit somehow survived, most of the black coating is gone but its still sharp and mills just fine, but oh my did it make a mess, im so used to no mess with the dust collector, I’ll be picking aluminum chips out of random places for months! 
haha
Here is up close, straight off the mill.
Here is the pump head that this plate bolts to. Used in nuclear physics research to achieve near-space levels of vacuum.
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Looks great!! What feedrates did you use?
I used the feedrates travelphotog recommended in the earler posts, around 575mm per minute and 0.35mm DOC. I probably could have gone much faster and much deeper since my machine is heavily upgraded, but I only had one shot at this and played it safe. The spindle RPM I used was 15,000 RPM.
better update with new pics, figured people might want to see what this project is going to be used for.
As you can see, its an adapter plate for a vacuum pump, and it came out perfectly. Oh the joys of CNC, the dimensions always come out perfect!
inlet port
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Looks like a turbo charged vacuum pump
Haha 
not far off really, the vacuum pump seen in the photos is called an oil diffusion pump, capable of reaching a vacuum close to the surface of the moon, which is really necessary when you need to do a reaction that needs to be very tightly controlled, like making transistors and stuff. The turbine looking thing in the center is actually just a water cooled baffle that keeps oil from splashing up into the chamber.
Wow, really cool stuff!
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Hey Emily,
Glad to see the project came out so well for you. The XC is very much a good mill for this sort of project with a few mods like we have made to our mills. The tool plate stock is so nice to work with and I hardly touch standard 6065 anymore. Great to see the project went so good the first run and that i was able to give you a small hand in getting it set up. My wife works for NASA and we are now based at Marshal Space Flight center in Huntsville,AL. Boeing and a ton of other folks like them are based here with the space program and the Red Stone Arsenal. You lab would fit in perfectly here on base! You can’t throw a stone around here without hitting a nuclear engineer or mechanical engineer in these parts. It makes for some great dinner conversations!
The one down side like you saw to an open mill with aluminum is how it just goes all over the place! Even with a closed mill I find the area around the mill still has swarf from time to time. Thankfully my wife understands and does not get upset. I do work hard to keep the mill room clean though. It is a never ending job but the enclosures help a great deal. So two tips on the end mill… The coating is still there, just the black dye they use on it wears off, hence why they call it their “stealth” coating. Also if you ever gum up an end mill 100%, just get some pure LYE and let it soak over night. The lye will eat the aluminum and leave the end mill alone. In a day or two your end mill is good as new and once diluted the lye can be poured away safely. Just keep in mind how nasty it can be in raw form though.
Hope your research goes well and looking forward to seeing what other things you produce for your research with your mill. Having the mill opens up new doors when you no longer need to arm out milling jobs for projects like this. Hope it helps to stretch your research dollars and allow new ideas to be explored!
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whoa ! that’s some verry nices upgrades on your x-cave ! can you show us somes of them more closely ?
Sure thing!
This is my controller with a relay block I built so that I can move the machine by hand without feeding power back and nuking your controller. To be honest, it’s not really worth it and the x-controller is better anyway.
Here is the switch that energizes the relay block and disconnects the steppers, while also powering off the g-sheild. It doesn’t work that well tho, if you switch it while the g-sheild is on the g-sheild voltage gets out of calibration and has to be power cycled, probably has something to do with sending a hold signal to no load. Works great as an instant e-stop tho.
I used 179 oz steppers everywhere so when I upgrade to the x-controller or what have you I can drive them even moar!
I painted my plates with appliance enamel because I live in Tennessee and the air here is pure acid which causes plain steel to rust in about a week. I also chose white because I like the contrast. I also used high grade stainless steel hardware from boltdepot.com, was only 3 dollars for all of the hardware for the steppers.
Makita trim router, 1.25 HP 10,000 rpm to 30,000
PVC dust shield skirts
Acrylic dust shoe from frost king door sweep and sheet cell cast acrylic. Works as dust shoe and also an air diverter for the trim router! I made this dust shoe in easel too.
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i love your dust shiel, and the white painting, great job !
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I have a Makita and looks like an amazingly simple to make dust shoe. How does it go for bit changes?
easy enough, I don’t use the lock button on the makita, I use the slots on the shaft with the included wrenches, and the top wrench fits on the shaft grooves right on top of the dust shoe, while the bigger wrench for the collet easily angles under the actual brush and can grip no problem. It is possible to use the button, but I prefer not to, as using one wrench and the button introduces force while your changing bits and can make you lose x/y position.
Here’s the easel link if you want to cut it out, you will need super glue or some sort of epoxy, I used clear resin, and inventables sells sheet acrylic, but you can also purchase it from the plethora of online suppliers. Also in terms of feeds and speeds on acrylic, it pretty much only likes 75 ipm. It can be an absolute bear to mill acrylic, it was by far my least favorite material to learn, right up with aluminum, it gets gummy very fast if not careful, but the results when done right are outstanding. You can change the hole sizes and stuff for whatever you have, I used a sump pump drain hose but I recommend against it because they squeal really loudly when you suck air through them unless the have holes in the right places. Vacuum hose has a spiral pattern in it to prevent high pitched air flow.
https://www.inventables.com/projects/dewalt-611-dust-boot
When you are ready to upgrade your controller, I would highly suggest looking at the planet CNC controllers over the X controller. If you pair it with a digital stepper driver, the result is really amazing. All three of my mills run plant CNC controllers and I get great results and after having used the stock controller both the Shapeoko2 and the XC, then the TinyG on both mills and tested out the same style contoller the X controller is based on, The Planet CNC is a much better value and more robust, No more Arduino processor limitations and it offers built in functions that the X controller does not offer.
By the way, which part of Tennessee? We are down in Huntsville, AL at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Stupid question, could you still use Easel with a Planet CNC controller?
That is not a stupid question at all. The answer though is no. Easel is only meant for Arduino based controllers that speak GRBL. The Planet CNC controller is an LPC4357FET256: Dual-core Cortex-M4/M0 ARM processor. The LPC4357FET256 is an ARM Cortex-M4 based digital signal controller with an ARM Cortex-M0 coprocessor which allows it to handle far more complex operations than a simple Arduino controller can handle. But this also means that programs based on GRBL are unable to work with the controller. Planet CNC uses their own software which is like Chilipeppr x10 and NOT cloud based. This means internet access is only needed the very first time the software is started, but never again unlike Easel and Chilipeppr which must access their net based software each time they are turned on. The P CNC software has a wealth of features like PCB milling, auto leveling, digital touch probe mapping of objects, Apart from standard g-code, you can also import DXF files, PLT/HPGL files, Gerber files, NC Drill (Excellon) files for drilling holes, images, texts… These files are all converted to g-code and can be used for milling through the software. It speaks full RS274/NGC G-code Gcode (normal main stream Gcode) and of course does full off sets such as tool and work offsets.
But the short answer is no it does not work with Easel and must use their own controller software.