Knifemaking Tuesdays Week 57 - Norseman Blades and fixtures Media
Published: 11 years ago
We're making fixtures and Norseman knife blades this week!
www.GrimsmoKnives.com
Our long awaited third batch of Norseman knives is finally under way! For this week's video I made a few new blades to test out all the changes I've been making to the design over the past few months. All new fixtures, all new CNC code, as well as some subtle yet wonderful design changes.
The first few minutes show how I made 6 new fixtures from 3/4" 6061 aluminum, 18" wide by 12" tall. I held them down to my vacuum table and faced them all with Tormach's Superfly facemill. Doing them all back to back ensured that they were all exactly the same thickness, making pallet changes easy and repeatable. I also bored 18mm holes in the back of each pallet so that I could press in the 12mm bushings that align to the VacMagic vacuum pallet changer. Then I flipped them and faced the top side to a thickness of 0.700. I also made a new vacuum grid plate that's 18x12, to go along with the 14"x14" one that I have. My table travel is 18"x10", so I like having a vacuum grid fixture that's the same size as my travel, it lets me maximize the table space.
In this video I show a lot of cool endmills for cutting out the blades, how they're being used, as well as closeups with descriptions. Almost all of the endmills that I use these days are from www.LakeshoreCarbide.com. I even had one custom made for a specific purpose! I show closeups of their rougher, finisher, and my custom endmill, as well as all of them being used on my blades.
The first blade had a few minor issues, no biggie, I changed the code a bit and ran a second blade. The second one turned out great except for one minor problem, the corner rounder went too deep. Again, no biggie, easy fix. Now after a few more changes I'm ready to run an entire pallet of 12 blades. We're making 65 knives in this batch, so we're going to be busy!
Thank you for watching, and I will try to get the videos back onto a more regular schedule. It's not easy, this 25 minute video took me 4 hours to edit!
www.GrimsmoKnives.com
Our long awaited third batch of Norseman knives is finally under way! For this week's video I made a few new blades to test out all the changes I've been making to the design over the past few months. All new fixtures, all new CNC code, as well as some subtle yet wonderful design changes.
The first few minutes show how I made 6 new fixtures from 3/4" 6061 aluminum, 18" wide by 12" tall. I held them down to my vacuum table and faced them all with Tormach's Superfly facemill. Doing them all back to back ensured that they were all exactly the same thickness, making pallet changes easy and repeatable. I also bored 18mm holes in the back of each pallet so that I could press in the 12mm bushings that align to the VacMagic vacuum pallet changer. Then I flipped them and faced the top side to a thickness of 0.700. I also made a new vacuum grid plate that's 18x12, to go along with the 14"x14" one that I have. My table travel is 18"x10", so I like having a vacuum grid fixture that's the same size as my travel, it lets me maximize the table space.
In this video I show a lot of cool endmills for cutting out the blades, how they're being used, as well as closeups with descriptions. Almost all of the endmills that I use these days are from www.LakeshoreCarbide.com. I even had one custom made for a specific purpose! I show closeups of their rougher, finisher, and my custom endmill, as well as all of them being used on my blades.
The first blade had a few minor issues, no biggie, I changed the code a bit and ran a second blade. The second one turned out great except for one minor problem, the corner rounder went too deep. Again, no biggie, easy fix. Now after a few more changes I'm ready to run an entire pallet of 12 blades. We're making 65 knives in this batch, so we're going to be busy!
Thank you for watching, and I will try to get the videos back onto a more regular schedule. It's not easy, this 25 minute video took me 4 hours to edit!