You heard right… we’re going to do some of our parts prep in-house.
We’re purchasing our aluminum carved parts from our partner and friends over at Mill Right. They’ll carve and debur parts (right there in Georgia) for us and deliver them in the quantities we need for the Dominator.
After delivery of the carved parts they’ll go into our blast cabinet and receive a beautiful bead blasted surface finish (right here in Arkansas).
(note that this is not our photo, but we’re going to be setting up a similar anodization line in the next few weeks)
We’re doing this in an attempt to keep costs low and instead invest in our own infrastructure for long-term success of the company.
Just imagine the parts we’ll be able to start producing with the Dominator carving aluminum parts in-house… going right into bead blast and anodized right here in Northwest Arkansas.
We challenge ourselves regularly and as we learn we share that with you so you can also grow with us. Setting up a full production anodization, bead blasting, and aluminum carving facility was not in the plans years ago but it sure is fun to challenge ourselves to become better every day.
If you have any questions… ask… and stay tuned. We’ll release more content on social media related to our new production line. Perhaps you could even follow along with us in this new adventure.
I do feel like life is a bit of a video game and in my head I’m hearing “achievement unlocked” in a big bold voice… LOL
I’m excited to get to delve into chemical side of engineering and understanding more there.
My brain is running wild with some very cool aluminum product ideas that we’ll be able to get into.
Plus, as usual, anyone coming to visit… very happy to share.
Would absolutely love to see a YouTube video on this setup / process if you’re willing to share. In my professional life I’m huge into material science but always come up short on parts finishing so I’d love to see how a ‘small’ business handles doing this in house instead of outsourcing. Bravo.
I was thinking the same thing. I try to do a video as often as I can but this would be a topic on how to elevate your aluminum CNC game imo. Those doing aluminum carving, I see this as potentially very interesting. Doing it as an in-house learning project means we’ll make mistakes but those are awesome learning/sharing opportunities
I’m starting from zero with this, aside from having an engineering mindset and college level chemistry class.
But YouTube is an awesome teacher when you get thru the like and subscribe parts
We have the effect space in our new facility for this with power, water, and even vapor extraction features.
It’s going to be a very fun project.
For those of you wanting to follow along and learn this anodizing together… I purchased this 20gal kit from Caswell: 20 Gallon Anodizing System - Start an Anodizing Line - Caswell Inc
They have other smaller kits which would be better for smaller parts, but we needed the additional size that the 24x24x12 tanks provided. Plus i was very intrigued by the PS they include with the the deluxe kit and the one I purchased.
They do the LCD or Low Current Density method and while it’ll take a while.. our small line should easily be able to finish a set of machine parts every 1-3 days. If we end up needing to ship faster, we’ll take lessons learned and expand our operation with larger tanks, etc.
At first we only have a goal of making our parts black. Maybe later we’ll expand into offering yellow parts for some future products I’m dreaming up. But for now we’ll keep our production line and our learning curve super simple with black died parts only.
As for the blasting… I chose the Eastwood B60 (Amazon.com). It is a smaller cabinet but large enough for the size parts we need to blast. It also has an upgradable gun that we could add later that has a foot-peddle. It also had awesome reviews online as well as videos. Plus it’s Made in the US so very fast delivery.
We’ll use a shop-vac with a cyclone for now and eventually add proper dust collection.
As for the glass beads, i wanted a fine-matte finish to the parts which will match the spindle mounts we ordered a bunch of previously. This can be accomplished on our 6061 aluminum parts using #13 glass beads… Amazon.com
Ok… this video is super cool…as far as automation. I don’t know if this level of automation is in our future but it sure looks impressive how simple and automated they’ve made this line. https://youtu.be/UKdm_hJdpQI?si=1c-dF4ApfJWg3m8o
OMG… It’s assembled!!! #13 bead material should be showing up this week and we can get started on the first batch of aluminum parts that are also arriving this week.
We have the perfect place for this machine too… right next to the PwnHDM
