Saturday, August 13, 2011

Long Board Upgrade Parts

As it turns out, the polycarbonate side plates were not as strong as I had hoped. I hadn't realized this until now, but polycarbonate develops micro cracks that spread under small amounts of stress. Every machined surface has micro cracks, so a number of the parts showed signs of cracks developing around the bolt holds. In order to prevent me eating the ground again I decided to suck it up and machine the plates from aluminum as I had originally planned to do.
 As you can see I attempted to use my material as efficiently as possible, so I crammed the parts into the smallest piece of 1/4" aluminum plate I could. The 1/8" mill bit took as long as I expected it to take. It was around 2 hours a part... Painfully slow as usual in aluminum...