After doing my first cuts in aluminum, I wanted to actually try and make a real part, to prove that the Pocket NC v2-50 was capable of making things that I can actually use.  My first attempt, was the same part I did my first aluminum cuts in, the sun gear holder from the BE8108 planetary gearbox.

This part attaches to the rotor, the sun gear, the position sense magnet, and has bearing interfaces to the planet input and the back housing.  While not terribly big, the number of features and mating surfaces is relatively large.

Now that I made a cut in wax, my next step with the PocketNC was doing basically the same thing but in aluminum.  There is of course less room for error with the harder (but I suppose by no means actually hard) material.  It seems that I managed to use up a bit more luck than I expected, but still not too terribly costly so far.  My “learning moments” errr… goofs, so far:

With my efforts to build a gearbox transmission and subsequent plans for a quadruped, there are a lot of parts which just can’t be made effectively from 3d printed plastic.  To date, I’ve sent out a few parts of the gearbox to CNC shops, which while effective, has a relatively slow turn around.  The best you can get without paying an arm and a leg is something like a week turnaround.  One thing I’ve learned from having a 3d printer on site is how transformative it is to be able to have single day turnaround for parts.  Thus, I thought I would experiment with CNC machining on a small scale locally and recently acquired a PocketNC V2-50.