Have designed my own PCB and have created the milling job and simulated it.

Have designed my own PCB and have created the milling job and simulated it. With great result.

This is going to be the new control logic board for my Max NC10.

Did you see the post on hackaday about auto leveling for PCB milling?

That looks really nice. I need to know how someday. :wink:

That looks cool. It would be fun to mill if I were setup for it. I’ll just stick to 3/16" acrylic cutouts for now.

Yea, I’m looking forward to mill it, but my Max NC10 cannot do it, it can do max ~85mm on Y. So I have wait until I get around to a larger mill. I do have one in my circles to visit.

Yes @Kyle_Kerr I did see it. My approach is to surface mill a wasteboard for perfect level, and then attach the PCB to that. The wasteboard surface is a 1mm deep pocket in which the raw PCB board fits exactly. You see the big hole in the middle? This is a fixture hole for a screw to hold Down the middle of the PCB while milling it.

If I recall correctly, part of the discussion for the z probing was due to the fact that blank copper boards may not be “perfectly” flat with respect to the layer of copper. Hopefully my comments on your post do not come across as negative. Anyone doing, is doing more than me. I just hope to offer information I have run across to help avoid issues as they progress.

Unrelated: I will admit I am a bit surprised to see you don’t seem to have made use of a ground fill. I don’t know what that would do for shrinking the board. It can help sometimes if you don’t have to make room for ground traces.

Thanks for your comments @Kyle_Kerr . I find it very usefull to get other peoples opinions.

I mill about 0.2mm off, with a 0.8mm flat endmill. So i will not penetrate the board. Others usually use a v carve bit which needs to go deeper or run more to remove enough.

New blank PCBs are curved due to the tenson between the copper and the carrier material. Temperature is also a factor to the height of the curve.

If I fix the middle of the board, II assume that it will be enough for the milling to cover the PCB completely. But if it turns out that I have to go deeper, I can do it while the pcb is attached to the table.

You are right about the ground layer. But the ground layer adds complexity to the layout and I cannot mill between the single strands anyway, due to the 0.8mm milling distance. So I have chosen to drop it completely. That could cause problems, but I have to take it from there. But the subject is now in my mental drawer of things to remember. Thanks for that.