It's been quiet from me for a couple of weeks. Lots of other projects and sadly not much progress on the machine.
However, today i went to visit the company who are going to mill my two castings. Really great guys, i had a tour of their awesome shop with some of their huge and awesome machinery! I saw some of their current projects, among other projects a HUGE mill from Norway which is also listed on their FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/Bast-Co-539029272911359 .
I've also had some feedback from them that others might find usefull in the future: Don't use cold-rolled steel for inserts that needs machining(like i did on mine). The issue is that the steel will have internal stresses from the rolling/pulling during manufacturering, this will somewhat be released and distort the steel while machining, making it harder to get the proper tolerances. Not a big issue as they can take smaller cuts, but they said toolsteel would have been better choice...or anything hotrolled...
Secondly they wasn't big fans of belt-driven 12k spindles. It might have been their personal preference or bad experience with belts, but it's also my conclusion: It's better to use an integrated spindle as it makes everything much easier and the price is pretty close to eachother when everything is added up...should i do it over i'd go for an integrated spindle...
They are completly swamped with jobs at the moment:-( The higher you want to be on their todo-list, the bigger the bill in the end....so i'm being pretty far down their todolist ;-) But i'll keep you posted when there are any news to report :-)
/Thomas