I'm a mechanical design engineer, and I cannot iterate enough how important it is for all design engineers to watch these types of videos to understand how a machinist thinks and works. This allows us to design, document, and deliver better product designs and plans to our machinist that will allow companies to consistent and successful manufacturing flow. Seriously, engineers are machinists and machinists are engineers, we simply have a false disconnect.

This little lesson right here is why Titan Gilroy is a godsend to the Cnc/manufacturing industry. He truly just wants us all to succeed together. Great lesson Titan, highly appreciated!

Yep, when I machined UHMW on the mill it would always come out under spec. Found out the work light on the mill, which was a regular light bulb, was heating the material and expanding it. I changed the bulb out for Led bulb and no more problems. 😉👍 Thank you Titan for all your videos. Information is priceless. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Several years ago I was inspecting a Delrin bushing about 5" in diameter x .50" long with a .06 flange and .06 wall thickness, turned from a 6" solid bar. I had inspected the first part off the machine and it was well within tolerance (+/- .005" if I remember correctly). When the parts were finished, they sat in a box for a few days until I could get to them for the final inspection. When I did, I found the O.D. and I.D. of the bushing to be about .005" undersize on all parts. "How could this happen, that first part was good?" I mentioned it to my father (who had spent 40+ years in the plastics industry) and he said it was likely humidity change, the parts 'dried out.' He suggested sealing them in a plastic bag with a few drops of water, so I did. A few days later I checked them again, and all dimensions were back to normal, well within tolerance! Now the work order/traveler for these parts has a note to keep them in plastic bags after they come out of the machine, and I haven't had any problems since.

5:55 I love this way of thinking...this is what makes businesses competitive. It's not that you can do the work, it is the pride that you take in the work that defines you. No matter what you do, do it to the best of your ability.

Plastics are a huge part of what we machine at our sign shop. I was a graphic designer, and was asked to replace the CNC role when someone left. What a rewarding shift of gears it has been, despite having no previous knowledge. Lots of watching videos like this in my free time at home to be able to learn for the next day. This channel gave me the confidence I needed to go hard and fast, especially on plastics and foamed PVC, and have upped the throughput and tooling lifespan hugely.

Nice to see you giving the knowledge like this, much appreciated! I like the facing trick of ramping up. Smart.

One of the best videos this year. That facing tip will get tried out on Monday. I hope it solves my problem last week 💥

Super kool!! My new shop does a lot of plastic and the ramp in trick to hold flatness is a definite try for us!! Ima pitch it to my boss next week and as open minded as he is i bet he goes for it!! And the hurry in amd out we did last week. They've struggled for yrs because of the thermal growth of the material and like u said they're instinct was slow it down... My go to is speed it up 1st. My last resort is slow it down. But anyway the hurry in and hurry out worked!! Great lesson!! Great info!! Love y'all and what y'all are doin for this industry and what y'all do for all of us machinists around the globe. Respect brother!! Have a blessed day guys!!

I got to stay Titan I used to complain to you in the past about the industry being corrupt but now I have an opportunity to learn setups and I already have a certificate for programming and you are the final icing and cherry on the cake your knowledge gives me the desire to start my own shop thanks for sharing your immense knowledge with us.

i work in an aerospace research and development shop, we use double sided tape for stuff like that all the time. Sometimes we even hold big parts with it. Its so useful.

Back in the 70s I would manually mill and turn clear acrylic. Drill, ream, tap, mill and and it had to stay perfectly clear because parts were used in the medical field. I used tapmatic oil for my coolant. Feeds and speeds had to be just right not to burn. I learned to get good at it... Enjoy your channel.

Plastics is my bread and butter, specifically polycarb and acrylic parts for medical requiring crystal clear finishes. Takes a lot of knowledge, practice and the right tooling to get those finishes. Not something you can just google the answer for.

Love it, I had to cnc some polycarbonate for my high school robotics recently and the testing we did for it was a lot and difficult. Eventually we found good setting and we managed to get a super clean part out of it.

Using the tape to hold the Peak is genius, I owe ya one 👍

Super cool Titan! Thank you for the detailed explanation.

Thanks that was a great idea about ramping to stop part from chipping. I work with a special iron powder mixed with resin and that will work perfect.

work on delrin daily in my shop and as per the vid my guys are brilliant at it. Quality every time but it comes with experience not with a sales flyer. Tooling,work-holding are key but knowledge is where it’s at.

Titan, I love you. I wish I was starting now. So much great technology.

man this is a really great educational video it is easy to make and contain really precious knowledge keep them Titan thank you so much.

I'm not a machinist, I like it. But I just like to listen to this guy talk and hear his stories. Good motivational listening.

This was a great video. I learned a lot. I really enjoy this channel. Thanks for taking the time to share.

Nice secrets shared! I actually agreed to all of the things that you said BOSS. Im working here in ITALY and been a machinist for more that 9 years and we are working on plastics every single type you can imagine. And i realy like working on PEEK and Derlin(Acetal). Really love your channel and Hoping for the best. Keep it UP! BOOM!

Speaking my language! Plastics are tricky, there are so many details and counterintuitive methods to working with them.

Love this! Super inspiring!

best video I've seen from these guys in a long time, keep it up!

You are right Titan. Plastic are way more tricky then metals. I have done a lot of Teflon. It took some time to perfect it, so the part is clean of "wiskers".

You are rockstar of Machining world! Your videos are super informational and inspirational!

3:45 - I did the same thing for a brass company last year for the exact same reasons (I.D. o-ring groove) but in brass, except I ground down by hand a 2 flute endmill to look like what your holding now!

Yes, this is what I want! Enough with the exotic Inconels and ceramic cutters that no one will ever get to use 😋 Cut me a slice of Tips'n'Tricks for the normal everyday parts and materials. ✅

Makes sense. A machine shop owner I think in Sunnyvale showed me a similar tool around 1990. Same reasons.

Polycarbonate and delrin… meh. I just machined ultraflon 550 (Teflon variant) and had to put a tight tolerance on a 3” bore in a 2.875 thick 4.500 square that always moved when released. Also all six sides got machined and had a separate setup (with no 4-5th axis) and there were 44 soft parts to be made with no extra setup pieces because the customer supplied 6” X 3” round stock with a 2.0 bore was hand extruded and cost $1000 plus a chunk. More $$ went into the bin as chips than into the parts. But all were nominal and on time. Delrin… lol. Love that stuff ❤️

Always makes me chuckle seeing this video pop up, remember when I first started my current job and the method for holding down a 2metre long x 300mm wide Delrin insulator was with double sided tape 😂

Crazy!!! Thank you T and God bless 🙏

Being semi-new to the CNC machining industry I have learned so much from Titans videos, it is truly amazing to see someone so passionate about the trade that they are willing to share all their experience so we can all succeed! Thank you!

I get inspired everytime I watch your videos

Excited for the next vid for this topic!

I need more info on machining plastic. I just started in a new shop 4 months ago that does nothing except plastics. Took me a bit to figure out work holding and figuring out which materials are doing what. Still figuring it out, more videos about plastic would be incredibly beneficial

Love ya Titan. God bless you.

very good video titans..thanks for your time

RPR is forgiving . Wow Sir to use your fascinating approach & Awsome attitude , this is WHY I'm surprised all the time, what a SHOP to work for, polycarbonate with 40% glass with geometric components NOW thats an interesting day @ the office

great video, awesome information!

So as a programmer to deal with hats after you flip a part. Your best success rate i have come up with is . Create an off set boundary about .025 larger than the od of the part. Ramp and endmill down with a profile cut. The hat will drop around then part then clean off the remainder of the material . For plastic conventional milling on the finish pass will lead to no chipping of the edges. Much the same way you would deal with lets say castings and cast iron parts as the chip very easy as well .

Indeed this Man is a monster n a certain type of person, continue revive us, love it,bam!

I had the pleasure of turning little Vespel parts, cool exotic material to work with.

Man, this guy is a great teacher.

Many years ago I watched my Uncle machine plastic bases for pipeline inspector bodies. He was extremely knowledgeable when it came to machining anything, especially plastics. As I was watching this I was wondering when you were going to get to the speed in which plastics are machined, and sure enough you did. He was a stickler about temp control as well, initial prototypes were monitored to adjust cutting, etc. I don't remember what type of plastic it was, to look at it when it was done there were no visible machine marks at all, there could not be any. He told me that if there were any machine marks in it at all, or is anything was off, at all, it would not work. A good machinist doesn't simply make parts, they make works of art.

Top knowledge. Good information.

I basically only machine filled plastics like (PTFE, UHMW, Nylon, PEEK, Acetal ext.). Hardly any metals. So its kinda nice to see a legit machining video about plastics.

You are the best sir !

Thank you, sir

love this guy

Lol now you’re talking my language, love plastic machining, with all the materials you mentioned, yes so many shops are lost when it comes to plastics, they think they can set it up vises and the clamp as if it were metal materials that’s a Knogo!! Plastics does shrink always a consideration never use oil, Always use vacuum plates fixtures jigs, pressure Padding, and lots of double back tape, router tables come in handy cutting tools have to be brand new, I usually put a coolant in syringes and inject into threaded holes prior to threading comes out like glass no burn marks or stress marks,

Great info.

This guy is truly amazing, so smart and intelligent. Would love to be taught by him!

Awesome thank you for sharing. Has give me some great ideas for my large hybrid 3d printer project. Please keep teaching us.

Just want you to know I have nothing to do with machining or anything like that interest or anything but the way you explain things in lame man terms makes it very interesting nice job you've been blessed my friend. Your an excellent instructor.

You are fully ready to take in die work. Titan I admire you. You would invest time in Nathan Oakley 1980

So cool hearing someone else talk about the difficulties of machining plastics. My partners have built a business that focuses primarily on machining plastics and aluminum. It's fascinating to see them deal with some of the complexities of machining plastics first hand. Most don't realize how difficult plastics can be to work with. I personally HATE working with polycabonate the few times I've done it.

Its perfection it is so clean and clear the polycarbonaat iam cursus to the rpm and feed speed in metric

beautiful!

You are doing a great thing here. Thank you.

Machined a lot of UHMW and nylatron at a hydraulics shop I worked at, deburring it was the only tricky part to me.

Ok , Here is a polycarbonate secret ,for slots or shallow work that need to stay clear, flood it with wd 40 instead of coolant! Cheers!

I work for a company that makes bearings and a large number of those bearings are plastic housings, made in the building. A 2 chemical cast that is made larger and thicker so it can be run in the CNC machine. These housings can't have pockets in them. It's more than just shaping and cutting these housings, it's the pouring process. We also make Urethane inserts but again same thing.

I love it when long plastic parts turn into bananas after opening the vice always fun 😄 very good advices we do the facing like that too 👍🏻 best regards from Germany!

Thank you

Toughest plastics job I had was R&D for a mil spec battery part. The material was Tefzel, part was 0.200 OD x 0.125" L with a 0.045 through hole, intersecting slots on the bottom, a bowl shaped pocket in the top with a nearly sharp upper edge... And 4 x 0.06 deep radius bottomed 0.03 W castellations at 90 degrees though the upper wall. Being R&D meant I made 100pcs. A couple weeks or months later I made another 100pcs to a slightly different print. Sometimes a minor change (tweek a depth or like that), sometimes a more radical change (F Cam rewrite). Rinsed and repeated at least 5 times. Then they had a mold made. That took for ever because the parts kept failing 1st Article. Which meant reworking/remaking the mold. The secret to getting usable parts was to machine the tefzel while it was submerged in liquid nitrogen. LN2 is -300° F. This did not freeze the tefzel hard. Tefzel looks and feels like milk carton plastic, but it is in the same chem family as Teflon. Amazing plastic. It did shrink due to the cold temp during machining, about 5% as I remember it. All codes had to be written to make parts that would meet spec once they warmed to room temp. Tools had to be dead sharp. The LN2 allowed for parts that could be deburred under a microscope. Even with that, I had a lab quality scope at my desk and spent as much time deburing as machining those parts. Without the LN2 the burrs would be big and include an unreasonable amount of mushing at the parts edge. Removing that, even with the scope and scalpel would render the parts 100% unusable. I also had programmed certain tool paths to run deburing passes. As in, rerun the finish passes without removing material. This weakened the burrs without damaging the part. With LN2 some burrs could just be flicked away with the scalpel. This was the toughest part to get right. I did 100 percent inspection on the parts. On a good day I'd keep 20 of 30 parts. 20/day was possible after a week of dialing in after being down for a while. The process took a month or more to develop. Over my career I made parts of many sizes, and many materials. Small Tefzel parts are a nightmare until you figure it out. Even then, it can be insanely hard to maintain the perfect conditions required to have consistant repeatability.

We have covered plastic tips many times on Instagram because it can be difficult. Stringy chips especially can wreak havoc when turning. Milling a slot or creating a series of grooves breaks up the material allowing better chip control when turning. Reversing drills upon retract quickly can often unwind the chips between holes. Peck turning in small increments can break the chips. Sharp tooling with a high polish, coolant if needed to prevent melting. On new materials it is good to make a prototype and allow it to rest overnight, did the dimensions move the next day?

great video!! I have some Delrin pieces to make

very nice tehniq for sec. operation - facing in ramp 😀

Thank you, Titan! I love that you're completely removing the blanket of secrecy that had covered up machining techniques and tricks! You've made machining mysteries common knowledge! Wow! Thank you soooo much for making machining public, mainstream, and easily understood! You're a hero to multitudes of people, both machinists and non - machinists. I can't say thank you enough to express how I feel about what you're doing. Thanks! :)

This was great, haven't machined in almost 20 years, but u brought back many memories and nightmares, yes the tape part I used it too, I was waiting for you to bring up UHMW, couldn't think of the name, of that horrible material,

Seems like most of the time it's the machinist's mind that solves the problem. I was a Westinghouse toolmaker's apprentice 50 years ago ( I took my final exams for my tool design degree with a slide rule). Every so often the journeyman shop would come across a job that they would have a hard time with. After they figured out how to make the part, they would send the print to the apprentice shop to see how long, if at all it would take us to do the job. One such job was an 8-inch long piece of 3/16 i.d. surgical tubing that needed both ends machined with a relief to hold a clamp. The machine used collar clamps so we needed to hold +/- .005 on silicone tube. Back then we didn't even have d.r.o.s . We only had the machine dials and dial indicators. When the apprentice instructor gave me the print my instructions were "MAKE THESE." The first thing I did was make an arbor to hold the tubing rigid. It shredded the tubing. I then ground a tool bit with all kinds of top and side rake and polished it with diamond lapping paste. It was probably the sharpest hand-ground tool ever. Same results. Both of my parents worked in the same complex and I remembered my mother had access to liquid nitrogen. I told our instructor I would be right back and went to my mother's lab. When I got there, Mom was just finishing a cyro test on a phosphor sample. I asked her if I could borrow some of the nitrogen and told her why. She said, " Just let me dunk these candy bars in it and take what's left". When I got back I froze one end of the tubing, took the cuts, measured, and measured again after the tube was back to normal temperature. This gave me a baseline of how much the part changed. After a few tries, I knew how much to take from the frozen silicone. I made the parts and handed them in about three hours after I got the print.

Thermal dynamics of composites are pretty epic at best when it comes to machining precise features out of them.

One of the better videos you have put out. One plastic material that can chip easily is ultem. Curious to see how you hold tight tolerances on the uhmw. One of my least favorite plastics to machine, peek and vespel sp1 are definitely my favorites out of the plastics.

Love it.

Great Lesson Titan. I'm sad to say I have been a CNC Machinist for 25 years and plastic still kicks my butt. I haven't had full control of the machining situations but no excuses!

vespal is badass, been machining that the past week

Peek and PVC is awesome to machine!

You have to be carful when machining plastic because some types are weakened by coolant. I've machined all types of plastic, Peek and Delrin are nice to machine, PETG not so good it can shatter.

Whenever im cutting uhmw i throw a thermometer in my coolant tank and make sure its 70F. If its hotter or colder ill throw a heating element or a chiller to get it to 70F. That shit is wild with temp

Thank you for these videos! Do you have a helpline of any sort that I could call into with a machining issue? I could really use some ideas on how to address some machining issues on Polyester and your videos have been a great jumping off point for conversations and ideas on improving our process.

Titan your a freaky genius

Never thought about it being extremely hard. I have done aerospace "engineering" plastic parts of +-.030 but I haven't took it to Xtreme like .005+- or less. I had fun cutting plastic. Definitely moves a lot if you don't have great vacuum suction.

we did see you do that glassfiber part with the dimond endmill

I machine a lot of acrylic on a old conversational mill and 70% of the time I hold down acrylic sheets with double sided tape. Pretty cool to watch Titan talking about plastics. I’d be very interested in learning more from their experiences

You talked about quality tools. I remember being in a job where administration was discussing with engineers and technicians about buying cheaper tools to save costs. That decision was above my pay grade at the time as I was a machine shop general operative but if it wasn't I would have stuck with the expensive tools because they were producing good quality automotive parts that the company were making money from and at a time when they could possibly have raised their prices if profit margins needed to be maintained.

Ive done alot of plastics you gotta work with the material and find the best approach, ive also worked with vepel a bit about 300 parts and its a nice material to machine

Aye you mentioned the tv show again 😁 nice. I bet ur competition is hating you right now saying wtf he's telling our secrets of the trade lol. An this is a very good vid imo. I love how you break things down an explain it. Nice job man.

Sir we wd love too see full machining vedio 🤩

Excelente maquinado de acrílico

very informative. I'm a injection molding process technician and I deal with noryl regularly. just recently got a contract to cnc hpde with a carbon additive. have you ever dealt with such materials ?

The fact that you make so much practical education for free is nothing short of incredible.

Another interesting thing is coolant choice. Some plastics, like acrylic, are sensitive to solvents. Make a part and it looks great, the next day it crumbles like it was made of popcorn.

You saying that acrylic chips makes me feel better about myself.

A lot like the manifolds I make for computer watercooling, cool stuff!

Great video! It was really interesting to see how you face op2 hats with plastic. I typically get bad chipping, so I would cut the profile of the part staying .03" off the face. Than I would take am aggressive face .005" above the face, and then come and kiss it. I'll definitely have to try your method though!

I can totally relate to that... me and a friend of mine make custom Water Distribution plates for computers and the Acrylic we use is an absolute Whoreson to get tight tolerances on

Yes. Machining plasics is a whole new learning curve. I worked for a plastics company for approx 5 years (2002-2007) as machinist, mon a CNC C-Axis lathe, CNC flat bed router and manual mill. One story I heard while working there was that a large, well known plastics company in Germany would machine parts to customer specs, inspect and sign off on the job, then guarantee the parts specs for 14 days only. As you stated plastics can flex after machining. Many plastics also absorbe moisture which can also be an issue,