DIY alu CNC router-log, new to this!

[Mi-Hoen]

Hi all!

i'm kinda new here, for the past few months i've been gathering materials and parts for my new semi-desktop-CNC-table-router. I've also spend many, many houres on researching. more then 80% of my time went out to cnc zone and it's forums, just the perfect tool to get to know what's needed to know

when i started planning i really wanted a router made out of MDF, its an easy material to use and fairly strong and stiff. not to mention CHEAP! anyway, tides turn. got hands on a nice lot of aluminium plate material (90kilo's ) the bits are small (10 x 30 cm) thikness varies from 1 to 10mm. great for making motormounts, nut houstings etc!



i got a small ballscrew from marktplaats (sort of ebay but then dutch) 30 euro's + 2 ballnuts. all new, perfect for my Z-axis. for the Y and X-asis i'm going to use much cheaper trapzium screw and trapzium nuts wich i will preload with a spring in the future.

after getting the big amount of aluminium plate i desided to eliminate about every MDF part in my design. exept for the groundplate and the table.
i bought some nice extrusions at www.damencnc.nl, all lengths are cut to the exact size by factory. cuts are very clean, allmost if they polished the cuts! way more expencive then 80/20 but i'm in holland, shippingcost would be massive!

i've chosen for the 40x80L extrusion, this should be strong enough. i'm one of those Keep-It-Simple guys so thats how i designed the router. so for everyone who doesn't have the skills/shop to build a router, keep on reading this thread before i got the 90kilo's of alu i allready ordered some alu plate material. kinda waste of money afterwards, BUT they do have the right measurements. i don't have a saw to cut alu with, so that would be a big problem.

i've done more diy projects, and 1 thing that i'm sure of is... this is going to take a while before it's finished. so there is a big chance that you guys have to w8 a long time before i post again. (i'm in my final year at school, so i'm REALLY bussy at the moment)

i've made some pics, the more pics the better!



the trapzium screws are also made by damencnc. thanx kevin (Y)

sorry for the huge pics, is it allowed to ask a moderater to resize them? cant seem to get that done

[Rance]

Kevin, Looks like you have a great start. If you have a table saw, you can cut some aluminum on that, but be careful. Thanks for including the pics. You can crop them using Paint that should come with your computer. Also you can set them to a lower resolution. Keep us posted on your progress.

[Mi-Hoen]

little update!

hey! my name is not kevin, thats the dude who made the trapziumscrews and supplyd me with the extrusion

i have just made 3 of 6 ajustment blocks of the y-axis. the plate aluminium measures 80 x 57 x 10mm the screws are M5 20mm allen.



they're not done though! 2 of the blocks will be bearingblocks for the trapziumscrew. the other 4 need a 20mm hole for the steel rod. these need to be done as acurate as possible, i cannot do that so i will need to go to a shop out here to let them do it. (all 4 at the same time)

i'm not going to use t-nuts since i have not found a cheap supplyer near where i live.i need at least 150... so i decided to make my own! they are 5mm thik alu (steel when i buy more :P) bars. they slide right in the slots of the extrusion as you can see. becouse i used M5 screws in stead of M8 its possible to slide the whole block aprox 3mm up and down. this comes in handy when i'm ajusting the blocks and set all the rods at the same hight/with.


mounded on a piece of extrusion

i'll be doing some more tomorow! cya peeps!