I went to my local acrylic monger yesterday and was captivated by this huge block of gray UHMW. It was _begging_ to become an SFS box.
The block was about 10 inches long, 8 inches wide and 2.5 inches thick. I needed to pare it down to 1.75″ thick first…
You can see the UHMW chips flying away from the cutter. I’m using a .50″ downshear cutter running at 12,000 RPM with a feed rate of 1.7in/sec. That cutter is an _animal_ in this stuff. I’ve never cut UHMW before and it was definately an experience I won’t soon forget. I’ll be cleaning up little bits of gray plastic swarf for the rest of my life I think.
Now we get on to the interior of the SFS box…
All during the cutting process, I was trying to suck up as much of the swarf as I could with a narrow shop-vac hose. The best I could do is keep the stuff from clogging the cutter…
All done! What a f*cking mess. *sigh* The block of material has been glued down to a sheet of scrap plywood with 3M 77 spray adhesive. Worked great!
Here’s the end results:
I really don’t care for the finish the cutter left on the box so this will likely be just a fun paper weight. Tomorrow I’ll get the .062″ aluminum cover plates made…
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Bre on 02.01.2010
Very cool!!!