My First CNC Built

[danilom]

After some search for a cheap cnc solution me and a friend of mine, went the other way, the DIY way.

This is what we have put together:

Used MDF for some contruction elements
Used steel bars (20mm and 16mm) for linear motion with
linear bearings and some nice shaft end support.
Ballscrews 16mm (5mm per turn) with flex couplers.
3.5Nm stepper motors (8 wire but used as unipolar)
Mardus Kreutz unipolar drivers
Makita 3710 router
Using EMC2 on ubuntu for control

work area is 800 x 600 x 75mm

Made cable chain from another zone thread.
After some tuning and tweaks all came together
very nicely, we got racking only at very high speeds
above 2000mm/min

Thanks to Mardus he helped a lot with electronics

Some pictures:





used endmill 2mm done in lime-tree


and later some youtube videos

[FandZ]

Well done and very clean. It reminds me of the fireball cnc. Congrats man! If you haven't already, read this thread on how to get rid of your racking. Make your Gantry rock solid!

Looking forward to seeing your videos.

[Rick Tiglon Eng]

Well done,
How many hours would you say it took to build? not including time to source parts as this depends greatly on budget.

It looks to be very effective, and simple enough to be built by anyone with enough commitment, To my mind saying something looks simple is a huge compliment, as we all know no engineering project is ever simple.
Best Regards
Rick

[danilom]

Well it took a week or two for planing, and a month to source all the parts,
meanwhile I assembled the electronics and when the ballscrews and motors arrived and z-axis was completed it took a day to assemble it and week or two to tune it and me to get to know it.

yes it resembles the fireball I thought its a nice design so I went the same way

[danilom]

Trying some plexiglass

[Rick Tiglon Eng]

Hello,
The plexiglass seems to be pretty light work, do you fit all of the LEDs up yourself? and do you have any pictures of the finished item with the LEDs turned on? as I was trying to explain the effect to my wife.
Best Regards
Rick

[danilom]

I havent fitted the LEDs yet, havent bought the LED strip

but you can google some nice pictures searching "led sign acrylic"
like this one

[Hdale85]

That's pretty cool

[atwooddon]

Danilom,

Nice build on your CNC Router. A quick question, do you get any sag or distortion on the 20mm rods for the X axis? I like the design of the Fireball as well, but the cutting area is just not wide enough on the Y Axis to handle the larger parts I need to cut. Your 600mm Y dimension is just about perfect for what I want to do.

thanks
Don

[danilom]

Yes there is a bit of sag if the cutting force is great, but if you plan on cutting soft materials and doing it slow it would be ok. Supported rails would eliminate this and mounting them is the next thing for me to do.

This is some recent work that I have done with my cnc.

http://www.md-tim.com/?p=164

[BobWarfield]

Nice machine!

Isn't it just flat out frickin' amazing what you can do with such a thing?

Cheers,

BW

[danilom]

Yes the machine and it's abilities are amazing, but I yet have to find a real job this machine will be used for. The prices of material and especially router bits are a killer here. As for now the only profitable jobs with this hobby cnc here are sign making and maybe making some unique cabinet doors.

Thank you all for nice comments, making a cnc would not be possible without the info here on cnczone.