I hit a huge milestone on one of my secret iPhone projects!

Shhhhh - it's still a secret!

I have successfully milled an iPhone enclosure that has most of the internal features, and parts actually correctly fit!

This is a HUGE win, given that I was very uncertain whether I was getting accurate enough measurements with my milling/flatbed scanner approach (covered in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/long-overdue-and-79118526).  But they seem to be spot on, and the Carvera is capable of enough precision to mill them well.

This was the big OMG moment for this project, or at least the first one.  It was the moment that made me realize this is going to be WAY bigger than I was realizing as I was slogging through the design and machining work.  This thing looks and feels like a real phone. And soon, anyone will be able to make one.

It hasn't been without drama though.  I managed to burn out a winding in the spindle motor in the Carveraa week or two ago.  To my surprise, I managed to successfully rewind it well enough to get it spinning again, but not well enough to get the necessary torque out of it.  It either had another issue I couldn't identify, or I did something wrong when rewinding it (maybe got the polarity reversed?).  Regardless, Makera sent me a new motor ASAP, and I was back up and running in under a week.

I'm also running into some issues with milling features on the sides of the phone, both inside and outside.

I'm running up against the height limit on the Carvera to mill the exterior holes on the bottom edge of the phone, for the speaker and lightning jack.  I think I can solve this with some very short bits, and some creative fixtures/tool holding.

I also have been trying to figure out how to successfully mill/drill/tap features on the inside of the side walls.  My current plan is make a fixture to place the phone at a near vertical angle, but tilted far enough off vertical that it allows the mill head access to the inside of the side walls. We'll see how that goes.

I've decided to punt antenna lines to a future video, as I've done so much already that I'm ready to share.  This might mean that cell/wifi reception sucks in this initial version, but I keep reminding myself this is all a stepping stone to something MUCH more exciting.

The last big piece to this is polishing/surface finishing.  I've been experimenting with buffing wheels, which give an amazing mirror finish without much work.  I also am most of the way done with building a homemade sandblasting cabinet for bead blasting, but haven't been able to try it out yet.  My current guess is that Apple is using bead blasting with tiny glass beads to get their matt finish on aluminum.  I'll then anodize it, and it will hopefully be pretty similar to a stock finish.

That being said, I can't WAIT to try out other finishes and materials.  I have so many ideas I'm itching to try, once I have all this basic design and manufacturing infrastructure in place.  There is a super exciting road ahead!