New Design - Hybrid 3-Axis Router/4-axis Foam Hot Wire Cutter

[the__extreme]

Hi Everyone!

Thought I'd post some pics of my progress so far. You'll have to excuse me for the brief post, I'm on my way out the door for class. Here's what the end product will hopefully look like. Some pictures of my progress thus far to follow later this afternoon.

- Shawn

[desktoprouters]

Looks good, post some more when you get a chance. What material are you planning on using?

[the__extreme]

As promised, here are a few pics of my build so far:

The first is a shot of my rotary tool axis in glue-up in front of the wood stove. As shown, its 3" deep, 6" high and about 45" long. The tube is 1" OD CREW, 0.065" wall, from the local Metal Supermarkets at about $7 CAD per 48" long piece.

Next one shows the same rotary tool axis while the skins are being glued on. In the background you can see the two 'towers' that will make up the vertical axes of the machine. Much like the rotary axis, the underlying torsion structure is 3" deep and 6" high, and about 40" long (ie high). Underneath the rotary axis is an overly massive frame for the table itself. Its an 8" deep torsion box, with 8" spacing between braces. Hopefully you can get an idea about how everything fits together from the design pics I posted previously.

My intention when I designed the table and axes was to post the plans after I built and tested them. By using the same 8" spacing on all bracing in all the torsion structures, I realized it would be fairly simple to scale and modify the original plans to suit the individual needs of whoever decided to build one, within 8" increments of course. Plus, for anyone without a CNC to cut their parts (like me), it also reduces the amount of setup time on the table saw and mitre saws. That way you can keep the same settings, rip all the same dimensioned pieces at once so they'll all match up during assembly, rather than having, say a 16th difference between two batches of cuts.

A few more details:

I wanted to be able to cut about 4ft wide foam blocks with the hotwire function, so there's about 4ft available between the two towers. I Router Mode, Z travel is about 12", X is about 36" and Y is 32". I needed two rails on each axis to resist moments when using the hotwire, hence I have two pipes on each axis. Will be using 3/8-16 drive screws on all axes, most likely with some AB nuts made of UHMW PE. It will be using skate bearings on the rails, but I'm trying something different instead of the 'stanard' angle aluminum approach. Will let you know more once I have some time to build and test them. I will say that I think this system has the potential to replace the tube-angle-bearing design. I hope to add a 4th axis to the router, once 3 axis is working, to be able to make some killer wind turbine blades.

There won't be a whole lot of pictures posted of the machine any time soon. I'm back at school now and don't have access to the machine itself. Its sadly sitting at home waiting for me to come back. I'm in Mech Eng at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, CA), and home is 6 hrs away in Petawawa (near Ottawa). I do have my bearing materails, electronics and access to a nice machine shop here at the university though, so I hope to have some time between projects, midterms & assignments to get some work done. I'll try to post some pictures of my controller board/motors/other electronics at some point, but don't hold your breath.

Check out this thread also. Pictures of things people have created with their CNC machines.
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33197
For one of my classes we had to use our light-weight CNC-Dremel to make a clock. I did the CAD in Inventor and CAM in EdgeCAM. You can let me know how close I got to the original Carmen Electra (yes, I said Carmen Electra). And, if anyone wants some G-Code done, I have access to both MasterCAM X & EdgeCAM, but keep in mind, this is a pretty busy time of year for me, so I may not be able to get to it immediately.

- Shawn

[vacpress]

that is really neat looking...

i like that for routing the weight will be lower, so the tall MDF gantry sides wont be as big an issue..

Still, I would just assume MDF pillars like that are gonna have some major flex!

Keep up the build. Should be neat when done!

R