Vertical position / Wood dust in the Controller

Continuing the discussion from Firmware 1.2 Beta (New):

Hey tmuka,

wow, a lot of wood chips and dust inside the controller. Did you think of enclosing your Onefinity Controller into something like this setup?

What type of dust collector do you use, workshop vacuum or dust collection system?

Are you satisfied with this nearly vertical position of the machine?

I also ask because if you don’t catch all of the wood dust with the dust collection system, it would fall directly on the one Y ball screw, and ball screws are incompatible with wood dust!

Hi @Aiph5u, thanks for the follow-up! I was pretty surprised to see that many chips in the controller box! I thought it would be pretty safe mounted behind my spoil-board since the only through-holes are the tiny threaded insert holes! I’m thinking in the very least i’ll add a side deflector baffle so chips can’t bounce directly in through the controller air vents.

I’d love to have more room for a floor mounted setup, but i’m working with really limited space in my shop! Without the wall-mount option from Onefinity it probably wouldn’t have been possible at all!

I use a modified Harbor Freight dust collector with a cyclone and a 55 gallon drum that’s vented outside. I’ve been using the basic Suck-it with the short brushes, and that has been underwhelming at catching the bigger chips that come off the larger bits while surfacing or 3d contouring guitars. It does have a 5" port and i’m using a 4" hose reduced (bad i know) to a shop vac hose that fit the suckit… It’s pretty beat up so I started 3d printing a new boot design last night so i can use the 4" hose.

I’ve been pretty happy working in the vertical wallmount orientation. I did have issues with the machine “letting go” during probing that i resolved with a spring balancer cable (i posted here about that) for the vertical axis mounted to the ceiling. That also makes e-stops less dangerous when the spindle free falls… Of course, i’m using a heavy 2.2kW HY water cooled spindle, so that is an “unsupported” configuration… Last week I upgraded the vertical axis stepper to the larger 3Nm size and run it at 4amp, 2amp idle. I need more testing to see if that helps with the missed steps i get with large bits sometimes.

The .25” threaded inserts and .75” oak dowel dog-holes make work holding pretty easy. Placing stock on the dogs aligns it and the 10deg angle of the QCW wall mount keeps the stock leaning back enough to not fall off during clamping.

I also recently did maintenance on my ball screw nuts and blew a lot of dust out of the lower nut. I also rotated the nuts so that the lubrication ports are oriented facing up instead of down, so that should be helpful for future lubing… This month I also installed a clear vinyl dust cover running over the two Y-axis thread and rails. (I actually redefine my X and Y axis in the controller motor settings and postprocessor, so it’s confusing to talk about without confusing others!)

I got my machine in May of 2022, so i’ve been drinking from a firehose lately. Fortunately I love learning new things and combining my love of building/inventing/projects/computers/tech!






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