alright finally have something which i feel might be worthy of most of the work in this thread. most of the stuff being shown here is amazing...and i cant wait to be done with school so i can have more time to devote to building awesome shit.
needed to build some CV bearing girdles for the FSAE team. im not on the team (dont want to spend all my time building a car they wont let me drive)
got everything set up in mastercam, then threw it over to our HAAS VF2
i started with a slab of 4 inch diameter 7075 aluminum.
in order to test the critical dimensions, because we didnt have a 3 legged bore gauge i had to quickly lathe up go-nogo test piece.
here i cut three concentric diameters into this piece of scrap we had laying around. the dimension given on the part was 1.631 with a tolerance of +/- . 002. so the test section has diameters of 1.633, 1.631, and 1.629. this will enable me to fine tune the machine and dial it in to get tolerances of less than a thousandths by adjusting for tool wear.
from this i found that with the first cut, the center bore was .002 under dimension, so i went in and adjusted the tool wear accordingly, then since the part hadnt been removed from the machine all i had to do was run the program again, and it went back and took off that last two thousandths. now the test piece fits perfect.
after cutting a half inch deep version of the profile, i took it off the mill and chucked it up on a lathe so i could part it off.
all this yielded this.....
I ended up needing to make 4 of these...the material they gave me was only enough for 3, so i will have to go back and make one more tomorrow.