As mentioned in previous posts, the Miniature Elevator needs a lot of precisely located holes and I decided to commission my CNC mill to drill them. I show here a movie of the CNC mill in action drilling elevator door carriage plates. The plates have eight holes each, but there are three size holes and also a spot drill operation so there are three tool changes involved (four if you count the first set up). Ideally, the mill would have an auto tool changer and each plate would be placed on the mill and it would then drill all the the holes changing bits as required. I don’t have that, nor do I even have quick change tooling, so tool changes are a slow operation. So it is faster to set up the mill with one bit at a time and swap all the plates through it, since it is faster to swap a plate than change a bit. So in the movie you will see first the mill doing the spot drilling of eight holes and then you will see four of the holes being drilled. The plate then requires two more passes through the mill to drill two more pairs of holes. In all, with 18 doors and 8 holes per plate, there were 144 holes to drill.

The finished product may not look like much, but remember there are 18 of them and the holes on each one are probably within a couple thousandths of an inch of where they should be.