A complete set of Precision Fine-Grained Carbide tools needed for operating your Quick Circuit Prototyping System has been included. The tool kit provided with the Quick Circuit system includes a copper milling tool, a contour router, 0.78 mm (0.031”) end mill, and various sized drill bits. Drill bits are industry standard 38 mm (1.5”) long, 3.175 mm (1/8”) diameter shank circuit board drills. Drills are available in any wire gage sizes from 31 to 70, any metric size from 0.75 to 3.175 mm and fractional sizes up to 1/8”. AS-DRILL-KIT
End mills are used to mill various paths in the board material. These are useful in narrow or wide path milling and copper rubout. The width of cut of an end mill is simply the size of the end mill. AS-ENDMILL-KIT
T-Milling tools are custom designed by T-Tech for milling copper circuit board material. The copper milling tools have a pointed tip. The tool depth determines the width of cut. A description and use for each tool is included below.
Contour routers are used to route a board outline from a piece of board material or to perform interior routing. If you don’t have a specific diameter drill bit, then the drill router allows you and prompts you to substitute a contour route tool. This allows you to finish your job instead of substituting an incorrect diameter or waiting to order a specific drill bit.
Setting Place Height
- The Plate Height is defined as the top of the machine’s table top (aluminum work surface). This needs to be set to ensure that the machine will not drill or mill into the table top during a milling or drilling cycle. NOTE: It is possible to manually drill into the table top, so use extreme caution when using the manual jog feature.
- Initialize first or re-initialize before setting the plate height.
- To set the Plate Height, open the Jog dialogue. Jog dialogue can be accessed from the “Mill” menu.
- Insert a ringed tool into the spindle (use the largest drill bit you have available, 1/8”) works well.
- Jog the tool so that it is over the table top.
- Lower the tool until it is just above the table top.
- Set the jog increment to 1 mil, or .03 mm, and set the jog mode to Incremental.
- Using a feeler gauge set to .010” move the feeler gauge back and forth in short strokes and lower the tool one increment at a time until the tool lightly touches the feeler gauge. This will be defined as the Plate Height.
- In the Jog menu, select “Set Plate Height” To define Plate Height, go to the “Mill” menu, select the “Setup” submenu, then select “Set Plate Height”. The Plate Height is now set. The Plate Height only needs to be set once.
- Re-Initialize the mill.
Setting Material Height
Using Contact by Touch: Refer to the ContactByTouch section of this manual. Manually setting material height
- To manually set the Material Height, first you can open the Jog dialogue or the Jog dialogue can be accessed from the “Mill” menu.
- Insert a ringed tool into the spindle (it is recommended that you use the largest drill bit you have available) (1/8”) works well. From the jog menu select get material height. The mill will automatically move to the target location for ContactByTouch and lower the pressure foot. It will lower the tool until it touches the material. This sets the material height automatically.
Note: It may be a little unnerving the first time you do this because it seems that the tool may crash into the material. It will not and you will get use to it.
Setting Tool Height
The procedure to set the height of a tool above your circuit board will be the same regardless of the type of tool or spindle assembly used.
Using Contact by Touch: Refer to the ContactByTouch section of this manual.
Manually setting tool height: The tool height is derived from the Material Height and the tool’s depth of cut offset.
- To set the tool height, simply set the Material Height and adjust the tools depth offset until you reach your desired depth of cut.
Setting Spindle Speed
IsoPro software controls the spindle speed. The upper and lower limits for the spindle speed are set automatically according to the Machine Settings. Individual tool spindle speeds, or RPMs, are defined in the Tool Pod section of the Tool Table. For tools inserted manually, the tool’s RPM is defined in the “RPM” box in the Manual Tool Change dialogue.
Tool Pod Assembly
The tool pod assembly is available in three configurations, 12, 24, and 32 pods.
All of the pods accept standard ringed tools.
Each pod is spring loaded to ensure correct placement within the collet during tool placement and extraction.
As illustrated in figure 26.1, the tool pods will correlate to the tool numbers in the tool page of IsoPro while setting the machine up. Ensure that the tool called for in the tool table matches the tool in the pod.
