After waiting a couple of days for the roads to clear from the snow storm, I picked up my Stinger I in Cartersville last Friday. Yesterday (Saturday), I moved the Stinger to its permanent home, set up the computer equipment, installed a spoil board on top of the base, wrote a Vcarve program to mill the spoil board and successfully milled it flat and smooth. This afternoon, I am going to attempt my first real project, which is a small V-carved sign.
Things were a little busy at Camaster because they were teaching a two day class on software and hardware. In spite of that, Master Technician Luke Bennett took out about 45 minutes from teaching to give me a detailed introduction to the machine and Wincnc controller software. That little private class was as good as gold. I had already downloaded and experimented with demo versions of the software and was confused on several points. Luke cleared all that up in a hurry. He is a great teacher and really knows how to explain things clearly and quickly. I am so thankful that he took the time to help me out. I also appreciate Gary Campbell arranging for us to get together. Their reputation for strong customer service is well deserved.
There was one piece of information Luke mentioned that I forgot about until it was too late. We were talking about dust collection and he suggested I should have it in place prior to milling the spoil board. Well I didn't. I thought I would just hold the vacuum hose up next to the bit (2" dia. surfacing bit) and that would be good enough. Wrong! Machining 0.050" off the surface of a 2 X 3 foot piece of MDF in one pass puts out an incredible amount of dust. It resulted in a deep layer of dust deposited over a 10 foot diameter circle around the machine. I quickly gave up on the vac hose and just went outside until the program completed. Today I get to find out how effective my new little Oneida Dust Deputy cyclone separator is at preventing fine dust clogging a shop vac filter.