If you missed part 5, please find it here.
The material
My friend chose to have the Dominion turntable milled from glued laminated timber called Acajou – a type of mahogany with a very nice reddish-brown color. This particular piece of timber is 26 mm thick and is cut to a width that fits within the frame of my ShapeOko 2.
I pushed the timber against one side of the frame and clamped it down in one side and tightened it against the side with a couple of small wedges – I had no room to do it differently.
Milling
Now, we start by running the Limit=-17 file in the x-direction, then the Limit=-16 file in the y-direction, then the Limit=-15 file in the x-direction and so on – alternating the direction all the way down to Limit=-1 which I run in both directions.
I do this to get as close to the final surface as possible. If I just ran the files in one direction I would risk to have to cut one or two millimeters off the sides of the holes in my last run, because VisualCADCAM will always move the cutter by 2,8 mm (the step distance in this case) each time it makes one pass across the timber – whether it fits the edges of the holes perfectly or not!
I made some films just to show you the process. They all play at 8 times the normal speed. In reality it takes from about five minutes for the smallest files to 25 minutes for the largest files to run.