I've been kicking around the idea of building a miniature CNC mill for a while and decided to finally get started on it. Most of my ideas came from the Tom McWire article on instructables.com, and I'm mostly building this as practice so I don't make any mistakes if I decide to do a big budget mill.
I intend to do mostly circuit board milling and drilling, maybe some plastic too. The "router" is a cheap 12v harbor freight cut off tool. The 12v part of it interested me, since I can very easily add on/off controls with the same power supply. The steppers are 3 NEMA 17's and I plan on using 1/4" 20 for the lead screws. I priced out linear bearings and decided for this project I'll just use roller blade bearings and channel and hope for the best.
The design is still in its infancy, and I'll clean it up and modify it as I'm waiting for the steppers to get here in the mail. The table in the model is 12"x 12", but I will probably reduce it to 8" x 8".
Except for a few missing braces and actual mounts for the steppers, here is what I'm planning on doing.
Any obvious problems in the design? |