NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat


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    Default NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    hey guys I have a question that maybe someone can help me with either a recommendation or if your shop can do this.

    I am a small one man shop that soley works on building my own plastic product that I sell and up until now I have been using a CNC router but I am at the point where I would like something much more rigid to be able to hold tighter tolerances and not have to deal with the flex of a movable gantry setup and I have decided to build my own much heavier fixed gantry machine with a table that moves in Y axis while the gantry covers the X for a more rigid setup.

    I am building this machine with welded steel square and rectangular tubing. I need to find a shop that is at least some what local to me that can heat treat a welded 2' X 3' 3" thick steel frame and then machine one face of this frame completely flat and machine 2 perfectly parallel and perpendicular guides for me to install the 2 linear rails for the moving table. I am looking to have this done to high tolerances and would really like to heat treat it first to stress relieve the structure.

    I am in the NYC area and anyone here who has the capability to do something like this I would love to hear about it. thanks


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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    Greetings from Brooklyn!

    Afraid I have no idea, but would like to know where you wind up going.



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    Have you built this already?

    I have heard people talk about stress relieving a welded part prior to machining. Personally, I'm not certain it will provide much value. The amount of material you will take off by machining will probably be small, so I doubt you will see much deformation, and even if there is a bit, you can just have a couple finishing passes with very small depths. It couldn't hurt, but, I bet it isn't cheap, and I am doubtful that it will make a meaningful difference.

    I'm also curious if you find someone to do this. I tried to find a place near where I live to grind flat some 1.5" strips, 4' long that I had welded to some plate, only one place could do it and they wanted around $1500 if I recall correctly. I figured it was only a couple hours work, so I passed and did it another way on my own.

    3" tube is small, IMO, to build a machine with. What wall thickness?

    What kind of tolerances are you trying to hold? I don't believe that moving gantry machines will necessarily give you worse tolerances, it really depends on the specific machine. What kind of router do you have now?

    Where the fixed gantry machine excels is that you can make the gantry as heavy as you want, so the machine can be inherently stiffer, which I believe will help you cutting metals, but not necessarily give you better tolerances in plastic.



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    hey NIC the stress relief is to allow the metal frame to normalize and relax the welded frame assembly, then hopefully not "move" further after it is machined, from my own understanding steel can move around quite a bit when it is stressed as it seasons... I'm sure there are plenty of welded frame machines that are not annealed like this that are still fine, but figured it can only help.

    the machine is fairly small, 2' X 3' and I am using 2" X 3" rectangle tubing for the frame that the table rides on, .25" thick wall tubing. yeah thats why I went with fixed gantry so I can make the gantry heavier and beefier than would be practical in a lighter floating gantry type design. the tighter tolerances I'm talking about are simply from the benefit of a much more rigid design, right now my tolerances can only be as good as the amount of deflection I get with cutting forces.

    my current machine is a Romaxx 2' X 3' router that uses only V wheels on tracks as the linear motion slides and this just makes for a very sloppy assembly, I can grab the router and flex it a huge amount just by hand. originally I bought some linear rails with the intension of just replacing all the V wheel guides but got to the point where I would have been totally re engineering the whole machine and throwing almost half of the existing machine away, got to the point where I decided it just made more sense to build a complete new machine thats much more rigid, then just sell off the old one.

    I'm not even going to speculate as to an exact tolerance that I am looking to hold because there are so many variables between ball screw mapping and exacting positional accuracy, to say that I want to hold .001" or anything like that would be almost pointless, what I do want though is to not have a spindle that can be deflected .1" just from cutting forces alone



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    I agree it couldn't hurt. I don't know if it will warp over time......I know it will warp if you cut it however if you're only removing a small amount of material from it, it should be fine. It just depends on the cost of having it done if it's worth it for you.

    I had a look at the Romax....yep I see what you mean, that is flimsy as heck.

    As the cutting area you want is small, a fixed gantry should be fine, but with good linear rails, and a heavy gantry, a moving gantry would also be fine. You could run a moving gantry that weighs 500 lbs driven by two nema 34's without too much trouble. But for a small machine, yeah, I don't disagree with a fixed gantry.

    The only thing I would consider in your shoes is the cost of everything, because it might even be worth considering a Saturn 2 from fineline automation, when all is said and done, it might even be cheaper than paying for machining services, all the parts, etc., not to mention your time. I think you'd notice a huge improvement over the machine you have. If you can find machining services at a reasonable price for this, I'd be interested to hear the results.

    I used some smaller tubing on my first build, I found it was far more prone to weld distortion. Now I am using larger tubing that I can get from the local scrap yard for even cheaper than the smaller tubing would cost new. Like 6" x 6" x 0.25, and my gantry tube is 7" x 7" x 3/8 with some internal ribs.



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    I have looked at many different machines and for my own use the machine I have designed is perfect for what I am looking to do. I am building my whole machine around a heavy pair of 6" dual vises so I can machine 8 parts at a time, many routers are not great at accommodating larger machine vises but I can build my machine specifically for this. my design is probably more of a cross between a gantry router and a gantry mill, the biggest thing that makes me still consider it a router over a mill is that I will be using an over 20K rpm spindle and will only be looking to machine plastics and occasionally aluminum but I am very set on just building this myself because I want it to be how I want it to be I guess. any commercial router is just not going to have the Z height to use larger machining vises and almost half of the z travel would be lost to the vise itself over a conventional router table unless I actually sink the vises into the table itself which would require re engineering much of the existing design, here I can design it around these vises in the first place and the vise deck surface winds up actually being at my table surface level, I can then clamp a large pallet above the fixed vises should I need to do any more conventional flat router table type work but most of my stuff is not done that way anyway



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    ok I think I have come to realize that I'm probably going to be better off just trying to find one source for the heat treating and a separate machine shop for the machining, or even just change my thoughts of machining the rail mounts to flat over to just pouring an epoxy bed for the rails as long as the frame is at least stress relieved first.

    finding a machine shop doesn't seem to be the big challenge, finding a facility to do the heat treating seems to be much more of a challenge so if anyone knows any place in the tri-state area that may be able to do this sort of heat treating i'd love to hear it but I doubt I'm going to get much action here in the RFQ section tbh, I'm going to start a thread for my build that might get some more input but here is a mock up of where I am at so far, the bars across the gantry are not what I'm actually using just sat them up there to get a feel for it and of course the uprights will be reinforced but can't mock that up yet because that will need angle cut tubing but they will be triangle reinforced. no fancy cad modeling yet just trying to get a feel for what I want before I model it all up




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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    Looking to do something similar. Before buying steel, I searched to see if anyone locally could do the grinding by searching "blanchard grinding <town name>". One of the first hits also does heat treatment and has large machines for either blanchard or surface grinding (72” diagonally/32" x 96" respectively). But for the size I'm also considering a brick oven and reil burner.

    Not clear how you intend to attach the columns. If you make those separate, bolt-on pieces, if you find you need more height, that leaves you the option to build just those pieces later. Moving them out to support the Y axis at the ends means more work area if that's important. You can extend diagonals to the rear for more bracing of the Y axis.

    I'm leaning towards rectangular tubular steel for the Y axis. I didn't see a way to fully weld the mult-tube.



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    If you do decide to put your frame in a brick oven and heat it up with a gas burner, make sure to seal it up in stainless foil first, packing it in powdered charcoal. If you don't, you'll damage the surfaces more with accelerated corrosion than you'll help it by relieving stress.

    [FONT=Verdana]Andrew Werby[/FONT]
    [URL="http://www.computersculpture.com/"]Website[/URL]


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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    its not going to corrode much at 1200F, which is about all you need to do for weld related thermal stresses.

    i had a basically 9 inch by 9 inch, 7 foot long, 350 pound piece of steel up to about 1000F with a single 3500 watt oven heating element. it took maybe 5 hours to get up to temperature. i had two layers of r-11 fiberglass insulation wrapped around it.

    I would make OP's project in several pieces bolted together, and it might fit in someone's pizza oven.



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    thanks, yeah this is hot rolled steel so I don't think corrosion is so much of an issue with heat treating it, and I was planning on making the base and the gantry 2 separate bolt together parts really just for final adjustment and squaring of all 3 axis anyway but I doubt I'm going to find anyone who's willing to let me bake these in there pizza oven for the required time and also from what I understand it needs a very slow long cool down cycle too to not reintroduce stresses back into the structure...

    the whole idea of building this machine is to try and fine tune and adjust everything down to as close to the thousandth of an inch in accuracy of alignment as I can and then have it maintain this critical alignment without worrying about material stresses causing any movement at all in the future. I do a lot of heat treating on the plastic products I manufacture and I know first hand how stresses and stress relieving can move material around and steel is no different, but my chamber is way too small and way too low temp for this, building my own chamber just for this alone just don't seem like it would be practical at all, I'm sure there has to be some way to get this heat treated without spending thousands and weather I decide to do an epoxy bed for the rails or machine the base flat I really want to heat treat and stress relieve it first, personally I believe this is a critical step in the process and no amount of compensation after the fact is going to make up for skipping this step, the end result can only be as good as the foundation it is built on and once the machine is finished it is then too late to do anything about it



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    Quote Originally Posted by rocketflier View Post
    Looking to do something similar. Before buying steel, I searched to see if anyone locally could do the grinding by searching "blanchard grinding <town name>". One of the first hits also does heat treatment and has large machines for either blanchard or surface grinding (72” diagonally/32" x 96" respectively). But for the size I'm also considering a brick oven and reil burner.

    Not clear how you intend to attach the columns. If you make those separate, bolt-on pieces, if you find you need more height, that leaves you the option to build just those pieces later. Moving them out to support the Y axis at the ends means more work area if that's important. You can extend diagonals to the rear for more bracing of the Y axis.

    I'm leaning towards rectangular tubular steel for the Y axis. I didn't see a way to fully weld the mult-tube.
    the multi tube thats sitting on th gantry right now is just for mock up because I don't have the larger profile tube for the gantry cross bar yet, those pieces are actually going to just be for the support frame the machine will stand on, I just used them to get a feel for the overall layout and yes the gantry will def have extended diagonals going back from the gantry I just couldn't mock that up yet because they require angle cuts but when it comes time for actual assembly these will be added as well as other cross bracing and gussets too, this was just to see and get a feel for the overall layout



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    Quote Originally Posted by turbocad6 View Post
    building my own chamber just for this alone just don't seem like it would be practical at all, I'm sure there has to be some way to get this heat treated without spending thousands and weather I decide to do an epoxy bed for the rails or machine the base flat I really want to heat treat and stress relieve it first, personally I believe this is a critical step in the process and no amount of compensation after the fact is going to make up for skipping this step, the end result can only be as good as the foundation it is built on and once the machine is finished it is then too late to do anything about it
    fiberglass and oven heating elements can get it to 1200F no problem. rock wool will be required to get beyond 1200F.

    I think you have a bigger problem. the frame as you have it now, is rather floppy. the beams the rails mount to are only supported by the ends, and those ends are connected to the gantry through an equally long beam.

    you need a square grid, with most of the rigidity focused into the area directly below the gantry, wrapping all the way around the machine. i would take another equally sized beam as what you've got holding up the gantry, and turn it 90 degrees and have it connect under the gantry through to the other side. basically a T shaped cross section that runs all the way around the gantry.

    you can notch the tubes so they fit into each other, then weld all they way around the perimeter of the joint.


    if the structure is stiff enough, then machining off .050" of an inch for the rail mounting surface isn't going to warp the machine enough to matter.



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    Default Re: NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

    thanks Eldon, yes I agree I do plan on running some cross beams under the existing beams too not just that single span like that, this was just mocked up to get a feel for the size and layout but right after looking at it I of course thought that I will still want to add beams going across below these too. I even thought about maybe some X braces or at least corner gussets to brace the squares, I def intend on making this thing beefy and rigid I just couldn't mock it all up like that here this was just to get a feel for the basic layout but I will when I model it up in CAD and then weld it up, it's going o be overkill and beefy for sure



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NYC area need a 2' X3' frame heat treated and machined flat

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