At the moment I am CNC obsessed. Even wake up in the middle of the night with an idea.... I suppose I'm not too different from most people on this forum. How did I get inflicted with this CNC disease..lol..
The symptoms started some months ago. Firstly my main interest and passion is building wooden boats and there it started.
i had a design commisioned (
http://dixdesign.com/ch21.htm )that I started building last year. Earlier this year I secured the rights to produce Kits for this design. I then started on my quest to find someone with a CNC here in Australia to cut the kits for me. There a plenty of people with machines, however they were not interested, too busy or couldn't be bothered talking.
I then looked at the idea of purchasing a machine, too expensive in australia (starting $50k+) so I looked at the various US machines such as Shopbot, Shop Sabre etc. To land one here in australia was going to cost around the $20k. Too much for a small part time business.
Then Dave from CNC Teknix informed of this site (thanks Dave) and from reading the posts etc and meeting some wonderfully helpful people such as Ynneb I thought' I can do this'... Being a hands on type I believe this is achievable.
I looked at the plans/designs available, liked some elements from each and from doing research have decided to build my own. It's not rocket science (well, maybe the electrics
)
Now 10 designs later I am happy enough to put metal to the grinder. When I put my pencil sketches into a form that is presentable I'll start posting them.
Basic machine details.
Table will be 3000mm * 1650mm to enable cutting of 2440*1220 sheets of marine ply. Base made from 100*100 steel channel with adjustable feet. MDF table.
3 axis with moving gantry also from steel (Ynneb please note..
).
Reliance Servo motors and Rutex drives. Mach 2 software.
X Axis will be belt drive both sides driven through enclosed drive system located inside gantry.
Y & Z axis at this stage will be Lead Srews (1", 5/8"). Y axis motor located inside the gantry.
Seriously looking at the Drylin Linear Slide System
www.igus.com for all axis.
The building all starts next week. I'll try and keep this log updated and hopefully include some photos of the progress.
cheers