A different way to get a DIY router

[flhr97]

I started out with a Taig mill and thoroughly enjoy it, but like a lot of people I wanted something bigger. I researched all the designs from here and other places and liked a lot of them. I wanted it to be servo driven though and we all know the costs of servos.

So I tried trolling Ebay and a few other industrial equipment sites to see if I could get something that was pretty much complete that would just require modifications to get to work with my setup.

After a month or so of looking I stumbled on this machine on Ebay. The guy had pulled it out of a TV picture tube factory and they were using it as a quality assurance machine to check the dimensions on the tubes. It didn't sell on Ebay, so I emailed him and asked to make a deal.

It was PLC controlled so I ripped all that out and spent many months banging my head against it to wire it correctly to interface with my PC and Mach3. Then it was a bunch of head scratching over setting up the servo drives correctly. I had a TON of help from people on this forum and the Mach3 forum to get it running and to recommend things to use like the porter cable router. Finally yesterday I cut the first parts on it and it works perfectly.

It also came with extra servo drives and motors inside the cabinet and a very nice Sony magnetic slide scale with digital readout. Cutting area is roughly 3 feet by 2.5 feet by 1 foot.

I just wanted to throw this out there as another option that people might consider when they are trying to get a router. I think I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800 dollars in this thing and that includes the 600 dollars it cost to get it shipped here. Of course that doesn't count the untold man hours it took me to get it running. That's way less than what it would have cost me to buy all the parts individually to put this together though.

[Hirudin]

That thing is very cool!