 You can't have computerized numeric control without, of course, a computer. And while the Linux PC embedded in the door might be weak, the mill that it's attached to is capable of chewing through solid titanium. But to hell with... But to tell the whole story of this amazing machine, I need to go back in time. In time. In time. In time. Today's video is brought to you by GlassWire. Are you worried someone else is using your wifi? GlassWire can alert you anytime a new device joins. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off GlassWire at the link in the video description. We've all been there. You bring home your new furniture from Ikea, spread everything out on the living floor and go... Living floor. Kill me. Spread all the bits and pieces out on the living room floor and go, what the heck was I thinking? Skimping on the assembly service? Well, this video is that. But on steroids. Due to COVID restrictions, Tormach is not offering on-site setup of their CNC mills, which means we're gonna have to assemble it ourselves. All 2,629 pounds of it. So what do we do? We just kinda go for it or what? Hold on a second. This is why we can't have nice things. Oh God. He's been so excited to build this thing. So much, it's just been sitting here for weeks. All right, have fun. See you later. Now I get to do the fun stuff. So let's get a look at my new mill. Oh, that's my timer. I gotta go get my COVID shot. And it'll take us this long. We're back. Okay. Oh, hello. Oh, hello. That's my new toy. It's a Tormach 1100MX. It spins up to 10,000 RPM. It is an absolute unit. So these are the chip trays. These are what hold the chips as we're machining. It catches the mess, which our router doesn't do a great job of already. And they're big. Boom. That's a chunk of metal. It's been two weeks since we started working on this machine. We have to put all of the sheet metal on the machine. We have to hook up the PC. We're gonna put on the tool changer and we're gonna get to play with some lovely machine parts and we'll come back once it's ready to actually start moving again. Everything about this looks really expensive. Yeah. Look at these. Yeah. These are all balanced to go up to 10,000 RPM. How much did I pay for these? Well, they also sent a bunch of pretty carbide. That is a sharp boy. Oh yeah. So that's a three flute high helix aluminum finish. How? Yeah, don't do that. Everything in here is now turning on and ready. Well, no, I mean, you told me these things don't stop for nothing. So. Ta-da. I'm not seeing movement on Y. Something's funky with Y. It's flashing green. I bet you I didn't tighten the collar enough on the Y axis motor and I bet it's just spinning. One of our new engineers is laughing at me kind of, you know, marveling at this. Knows I have no idea how to operate it. Here's something I know a thing or two about, okay? Computer mice. The ergonomics of this thing, they could be a little better. The finest silicone sheath over top of the most generic Chinese-ium mouse. I am covered in metal chips. This is fun. But let's go flick a switch. Whoa. Is that the code pump running? Uh, yes. Let me see that on that boiler. Tool changes. How do they work? Okay, let's fill it with coolant. Oh, sh**. Oh. That coolant pump's been running dry this whole time. Did you plug it into an accessory rather than into the coolant pump pump? Oh my God, yes I did. Yeah, okay. Well, that might've destroyed the pump. Okay, is it in the coolant one now? Okay. Okay. Woo. Uh-huh. Now short of pulling off the CPU heat sink, which appears to be glued on, so I'm probably not gonna do that. We have no way of knowing exactly what this computer is. Other than that, it's really simple. This computer is, other than that it's running four gigs of Kim Tigo RAM. It has a 64 gig PCI express SSD, another mini PCIe slot over here, and a SIM slot. And then this is a funny one. It's got about the banginest speakers that I've ever seen in an embedded machine, but there's a good reason for that because when this thing is running, it can actually get pretty loud. So if it needs to make a noise that you actually need to hear from inside this sealed enclosure, that's pretty much the way to do it. Honestly though, this little Linux box is not the most interesting part of the computerized control. Coming past our mist coolant reservoir we've got, ah, here it is, and it goes. Oh. So here is the 220 volt transformer. So that's where power gets transformed into all the different voltages that we're gonna need. Here is, oh, this thing is super cool. This pretty much what it is is a gigantic ceramic resistor with a heat sink on it. And what it does is whenever you wanna stop the spindle spinning, you actually need to take the power that the spindle would otherwise continue to generate and get rid of it somehow. So it's just this gigantic resistor that just stops it right dead. On the topic of spindle control, of course we wanna do more than just stop it. And this puppy right here is our spindle VFD or variable frequency drive. You could think of this kind of like a PWM fan header on your motherboard that can make it run at different speeds depending on how often it pulses power, except on absolute fricking steroids. So we can drive the main spindle at up to 10,000 RPM and all the way down to what, 100, something like that. Fancy. The rest of this is cable management, a variety of breakers and relays. Here's another power supply, and that leads to this puppy right here. So this you could think of as kind of like our secondary brains of the operation. And what this basically does is it takes whatever signal comes out of our Linux computer at the front and turns it into something that all of our motors can understand. So our X, Y, Z will all get a signal that they can interpret from this. This is probably our best look at the ClearPath servo motors that drive the X, Y and Z axis. So compared to stepper motors, which are what we use on our CNC router, they're not as torquey, but they actually know exactly where they are rotationally. So it can relay that information to the computer. The computer can say, okay, I know exactly where this other one is. And you can actually have the motors work together. We could actually harden out our tap and then we could have both our Z axis and our main spindle work together to just drive it in, tap the hole, take it back out and we're done. I actually lied a little bit. This one is not technically a servo motor. It does have the same magnetic array and the same hall effect sensor that allows it to know exactly how many times it's spinning and where it is. It's just that it sends that raw data over to our computer to process rather than having an onboard encoder that sends it out. Sorry. However they do it, Tormach has another even more important reason for needing to know the exact position of the main spindle. And that is for tool changes. Now on any normal CNC mill, you would need to be able to change out your tools because you might have different size bit or a different function bit that you need to pop into the main spindle. So the way you would normally do that is you line up your little doggies or something. Oh, there we go. There it is. Look at that. And then you press that again. Hey, look at it go. But this one is special. This puppy has a carousel that can hold up to 12 different tool holders, allowing you to do complex jobs with the tools automatically changing. So what it'll do is it'll line it up exactly where it's needed. The tool changer comes in, grabs it, spins around, pops another one in. The whole thing is pneumatically driven and the whole job just goes. So cool. Of course, none of this does anything without the computer to control it. We've got a pretty sweet touchscreen interface for it, but whether you're running touchscreen or a spongy mouse and keyboard, you're gonna be running a version of Linux CNC called PathPilot. And one of the coolest things about PathPilot compared to Mach3, the control system that runs our router over there, is that it actually runs at the speed of the processor. With Mach3, you send a command to the board that then processes and outputs step and direction signals to move the motor. That means when you hit stop on the router, it still has to process those extra commands before it even sees the stop. Now you can emergency stop it, but doing that means you kill power to everything and you have to re-reference the machine, which is a big boatload of suck. On the Tormach, if you hit feed hold in a program, it stops. And we'll show you that, but first, just I wanna play around with this thing a little bit. So if you wanna set your rip-ems, let's do 5,000. Neat, huh? We can stop it. And then we actually put in just a little simple program here. So it's just moving this back and forward on the X axis, and I'm gonna go, hold. Pt, tt, tt, tt, hold. Ah! Let's stop and reset and show you guys something else that's really cool though. Aside from the tool and making sure that the path it's gonna follow is right, the main two things you need to concern yourself with when you're cutting different materials are the speed of the spindle and then the feed rate as the machine moves around on all the different axes. While some piece of metal might be really consistent from one sample to the next, a material like wood, it could be all over the place. And you could go, oh yeah, 2,000 is usually good, but why don't we try turning this up a little bit and see how it goes? You can do all that without changing your program. And you can do the same thing for your feed rate as well. So if I stop this and I start my cycle again, what? Of course you can have all the precision in the world up here, but if your part is not held in place extremely securely, you're just gonna end up with a giant mess. And that is where this comes in. So this puppy right here is absolutely covered in these threaded holes that have these super handy little plastic inserts. So what you can do is you can take, say, okay, we want a mod vise here, which is really cool. Cause it can hold onto just a sliver of your materials. You can work on one side, then just like shave off the back. We can put a regular vise in here. We could put a fourth axis in here. And then what you do is you tell the machine, okay, I've got this offset for when I'm gonna mount it in that thing. And without redoing your program, re-zeroing or re-indicating the machine, you're ready to freaking go. Now, one of the most useful things that you can do with this feature is you can add an additional axis. Neat, right? So unlike our CNC router, which is perfect for making two and a half D parts, the new mill here is four axis. This is an A axis, which is a rotational axis along the X axis. So you could take a part and you could actually roll it and work on the sides or on the back without taking it out and repositioning it. Super neat. Oh yeah, this is a perfect example of the kind of part that what, with maybe two or three resets, you could make in a setup like this. The bike pedal, it's a Collins old job. That's okay, he likes his new job better. Debatable. So as spec, what does this go for? It's like 35, 40 grand. 35, 40 grand. Somewhere in there. Which raises the question, why does a machine like this cost like it does? Most purchasers of something like this would be using it to make money. And there's just a higher tolerance for cost when it comes to money making machines. And as everyone knows, money equals time. So it comes down to what features it has that makes it faster and easier to use. And that's where things like that fourth axis come in. I mean, being able to work on multiple sides of a part without going in and painstakingly moving things around and re-zeroing, that's money right there. Of course, for us, that's not really the plan. We're just gonna use it to like, make cool stuff for our videos. I guess we should do a demo, right? Yeah, let's make some chips. Okay, well, first thing safety. Should never be run without that closed. And you guys are gonna see why in just a moment here. So this is cool. It uses like an air blast to clean off the tool before it puts it back in the tool changer. So which one should I use to hack up that aluminum block? They're all good for doing that. Okay, so what do I- So now if you use the arrow keys on the keyboard, you're gonna jog. Up and down is page up, page down. That's really user friendly. Ba ba ba ba ba ba. Now you might think, wow, gee, you're gonna run out of coolant pretty fast there, Rick, but it all collects in this little filtered reservoir on the bottom and then it recirculates it. Now normally we wouldn't have it in like flood mode like this for making videos, but that's where the mister comes in. I'm not gonna plunge it straight into the thing. I don't trust you, man. Come on, Colin, give me a little bit. Technically it's your machine. Oh, here it goes, boys. See you later, metal. Look at the metal shards at the back, ladies and gentlemen. You wanna clean it up? We got tools for that, Linus. Ah, sprayed me. How many thou is this thing accurate to? I mean, I haven't dialed it yet. I think the spec is two tenths of a thou to four tenths of a thou. It's like there's no burn-ness. There's just, it's not even wet. It's like, bleh. Because it's non-porous, you made a clean surface. You can blow literally all the coolant off of it. We switched the plugs in the back. We are now in misting coolant mode. Here comes a misty boy. Do you wanna position it? Just the tip. And only for a second. And only what? Nevermind. Oh, wow, that's pretty wimpy, isn't it? It's called minimum quantity lubrication. So it's just enough coolant to keep things moving. If you need something to be, say, clean, you can run clean fluids rather than a recirculating coolant. You can have a different one in your mister versus what you have in your flood coolant. It can get fancy. Oh my God. Somehow it's both perfect and not sharp. Nothing quite like a brand new machine running brand new bits, eh? Why that finish is so good is because when you plow a tool through a part, it's gonna naturally deflect. And the router, it's just so big, it can't be rigid. This little tool, it's a lot denser and a lot heavier. So it deflects less and you get a better finish. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. Almost incredible as my segues to our sponsor. Drop.com have launched a new unique key cap in collaboration with Hammer that will be the envy of all your friends. That's right, they're bringing 2017 back with the Fidget Spinner Artisan Key Cap. It has a spinnable top shaped just like the spinners that you see on the streets if you went back in time. And it comes in seven vibrant colors from transparent watermelon to spotted cheetah and everything in between. I personally don't know what's in between a watermelon and a cheetah, but I'm sure it's amazing. It's the perfect time killer in between loading screens and game rounds when you're not doing pushups. So don't wait, spin into action with your Fidget Spinner Key Cap at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go back in time and have a look at our commissioning video for the router. That was quite the adventure for Alex way back in the day. Oh wait, these are both mini PCIe. What the? Okay.