Hi,

I'm new to this forum and am about to embark on quite an adventurous challenge, I want to build a CNC machine to fit onto a wall, to climb vertically and horizontally, to drill holes into a wall and then to place things inside the holes, a CNC peg board if you will.

Does anyone know if this is possible, I assume it is not just a case of turning a CNC machine on its side as the weight of the gantry is not designed to travell vertically.

If anyone could help this would be amazing.

you are going to have to be a lot more specific for anyone to give you any help.

what material will the wall be?
what is the application?

Matt

Well, you are in luck. The basic concept that you are thinking of is called horizontal boring / milling. A very simple example of this can be found at many hardware / lumber stores that sell sheet plywood - in this case, it is usually in the form of a device that holds the plywood on its side, and then uses a circular saw to make various cuts.

In this case, it is designed like this mostly to save space.

There are some commerical cnc routers that exist as well, one can be found in my DIY build thread http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38940

My progress has been slow so mostly you will first see a true rank beginner trying to figure out cnc and how to not spend too much money in that thread, but there is a link to a commercial variation - sold in the UK I think.

In many ways, it is in fact just as easy as you think it might be - the biggest variation from a conventional horizontal machine is that it needs a way to counter gravity for the vertical axis, or life will be a pain. This can be dealt with using constant force springs or counter weights (like an elevator)

I would really like to see where you go with this, as we horizontal boring / milling guys need company. :)

THing is I have absolutely no knowledge of CNC or electronics or computers, do you think I am attempting too much!

Hi, maybe you can tell us just a bit more about your application, which will make it a bit easier to help.

I am imagining this as being for building sort of a "climbing wall" where you need lots of holes drilled for pegs - maybe 25 - 50mm diameter every 300 - 500mm. on a straight grid of X and Y.

The holes are all going straight into the wall of material X - Plywood ?

I am assuming that you would use this rather than hand drilling each hole, so hand drilled tolerances are ok - maybe +/- 1 - 2 mm center to center ?

The size of the wall I am just guessing is maybe 5 x 5 meters ?

Then you mention that the machine itself will put the pegs in automatically ? Is that a "requirement" or just a "convenience" ?

What you don't mention, is that when you are finished with the project, I assume you take it all apart and go home - not leave it installed. This takes the build down a slightly different direction than if you were planning to leave the equipment in place and move parts up to it.

Can you build it - I would say yes. That is a matter of desire.

Should you build it ? If it is for commercial use, it might make more sense to hire out the build. It will take at least 500 man hours to learn enough to do it, and another 500 hrs to build / test it. Materials will be more than US $ 3,000, but likely more like $ 20 K unless you have time to do a lot of scrounging.

Perhaps consider developing your spec more first (this thread will work) and then putting it up for RFQ in the section of cnczone for that area. There are lots of people looking for work to do.

All you need is to add some position feed back and a drill to this little robot http://www.icm.cc/

The model I want to build will be about 2m wide by 3m high, it is essentially to archive bricks in a wall (wierd i know but it is part of my architectural project) in a similar fashion to this model I have built.

I have looked at fabbers or www.fabathome.org, although these are 3d printers i like the style of cnc machine it builds so was wondering if anyone knew of how to build a karger scale machine to move on the x, y and z axis?

.......... do you think I am attempting too much!

Yes. :)

I think you'd need to (semi?) permanently mount some rails to the wall, either horizontally or vertically. Most likely some custom software programming will be involved as well. Drilling the holes would be easy, placing something in them would not.

My guess is that the number of hours put into building such a machine would be greater than just drilling and putting in the pegs yourself.

That being said, I would go with what Gerry said. Mount some rails along the top and bottom and then have a rail going between them. A counter weight on a pulley I imagine would work just fine, provided the top rail can take the support.

No offence to the people playing with the Fab@home.... But aaaa I thought we were crazy..hehe

But I'm with the other people saying put the pegs in your self. Would be intersting to come up with a peg autoloader which could sit along side the drill though. Some how extend down to deposit one. Would take some programming to do or machros in mach which I have no idea how to do

b./

I dont think you are quite understanding me,

If I were to build this for real the wall would be about 60m across and 100m deep having approximately 6000 bricks on it, I only want to build a small scale section a model, yes it would be easier to drill holes but this is not the point, the point is that the machine archives the bricks to thier allocated holes and can recall them at any point.

I hope this clears things up.

the point is that the machine archives the bricks to thier allocated holes and can recall them at any point.Ohhhhh...

...Why?

Trying to grab and place the bricks becomes a difficult task. Getting there isn't the problem, as much as having the mechanism for grabbing the piece is. I'd be interested to hear other's solutions to this.

Because my museum is an archive for bricks

A larger version of this could work. Maybe only need two winches as gravity could take the place of the third.
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Alex_Joni%27s_Toy

Would likely be a conversation starter for a museum.

Two applications you could investigate that are similar to what you are considering are automated volume retrieval in libraries and automated part picking in warehouses.

I think the library systems are built in as part of the stacks, but I have seen pictures of part pickers that had a small column which the grabber travelled vertically on while the base of the column ran along a track on the floor along the front of the shelves; I don't know if there was an upper track for stability.

Hi, I have been thinking about your museum goal for bricks and storage. There is an aspect about normal bricks that might make this design concept not ideal - drilling holes in a brick and hanging it by the hole puts a lot of tensile stress on a very small point. Bricks are designed for compression loads, not tensile loads. It is quite likely that if you use the proposed hanging method, there will be substantial mechanical loss of the bricks to damage.

I would like to humbly suggest that you consider more of a shelving type arrangement where at least 60 % of the brick is sitting on a shelf. An alternative might be to put the bricks in some kind of clear plastic box and hang the box instead.

I think one point that might be helpful for us to understand - is the intention that the bricks are just archived / available for recall - sort of like an automated library book retrieval system - or - is the intention at least in part to also display the bricks ?

To answer your most basic question - how big of project is this - I would think it could be completed within 1 year with access to proper tools and some reasonable amount of spare time - and perhaps no girlfriend to distract you. :)

A larger version of this could work. Maybe only need two winches as gravity could take the place of the third.
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emc...x_Joni%27s_ToyI have seen this used for spray painting on walls, however accuracy is a big issue. Swinging is easily induced (especially if grabbing heavy objects) and weight becomes an issue. You would need a pole/rope/counterweight hanging from a sliding rail to relieve the stress. Could work, though.

Jazzy,

I am a PLC (programmable logic controller) programmer and just reading through the post I think I can do exactly what you want on a large scale using a PLC and some encoders. I envision having a spreadsheet in excel that defines the individual bricks, these definitions get sent to a data registr in the PLC input from the operator using a front -end program on a touch screen or just excel would tell the thing which brick you want to retrieve and the motors run until the coordinates of that brick are reached by the encoders, at this point the PLC tells the third axis to get the brick and go to the home position where you can collect it.

Theck out this. I know its not exactly what you're asking about, but it might be an alternative to your thinking.

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