After talking about the ill-fated Arduino shields, here’s something more pedestrian. Whenever I’ve used the mill, I get chips everywhere and they get dragged into the house. It also feels a bit sketchy using the Superfly cutter without any kind of protection, since if the insert holder were to come loose it would go flying off at high enough velocity to give someone a bad day. So I went down to Home Depot, got a sheet of Lexan, and made a chip shield:

The Lexan chip shield.

It’s pretty simple, I reused some aluminum angle left over from the storage rack and screwed the Lexan to it. It’s a pretty amazing material, only about 2mm thick but super strong and flexible. I’m pretty confident that anything coming off the mill will ricochet off that thing and not go through, because it’ll flex enough to absorb the kinetic energy of the projectile.

In case you are interested, I found this rather entertaining video demonstrating the difference between polycarbonate (Lexan) and acrylic on youtube:

I’ve tried the shield and it works very well, no chips are really thrown high enough to go over it. On the other hand, it is just a tad too tall for me to comfortably be able to change an endmill or move the stock around, and it’s kind of a pain to get out of the way when working on the mill. Maybe I can design something that lifts it out of place when not needed…

Oh, and I heard back from CNCFusion about the mismatched X-axis. They agree and are puzzled. It seems the most likely case is that the mill has been redesigned since they designed their kit, so they are going to ask some other customers if they see a similar mismatch.