Newbie- New to CNC & this website - Wants to build own machine at home.

[Kimbal]

Hello to all;

I hope I'm in the right section - if not, my apologies.

I'm new to this website and CNC Engineering. I live in Queensland, Australia and have a good trade background of some 30 or more years in Electronics and quite experienced with most machine tools used in workshops. I've worked in enough of them over the years to know what a CNC machine is. Currently my tooling access is very poor - with a whole host of reasons as to why and how this came to be - I only have hand tools and a few small power tools. So I am starting from scratch with very low income and just very basic workshop access.

My interest in being here it to learn and hopefully construct a couple of CNC machines for my own workshop needs, that being a Coil Winder (for winding transformers) and ultimately a metal cutting CNC table ( for making chassis and front panels designs). My alternative interest is with Tube Audio and building your own output transformers, mounting chassis and the like at home.

I seem to have a number of old computers laying about in storage and would like to try and adapt one of these to make a professional working CNC machine; rather than build all the electronics from scratch. Though I could build the electronics myself, I see little need unless the circuitry is cheaper and simpler to fabricate than adapting an old PC.

Any advice about this would be greatly appreciated. I will need software ( to suit windows XP ) and maybe some driver hardware to interface the PC to the stepper motors.

Added can I salvage old stepper motors from printers and floppy drives for this type of job; OR, are these to small and I will need bigger sized steppers ?

The size of the sheet metal table I am looking at making would be about a metre square in area. If successful I may make a larger unit.

For now just some guidelines will be fine; as I haven't even started building anything as yet and will be doing so from scrounged junk materials at our local 'TIP TOP TIP SHOP' ( our Local Council Hard Rubbish Dump-Shop ).

Thanks !

[machinehop5]

Welcome to CNCZone. You may want to look into using EMC2 for software. It's free and very flexible. Heres the website http://www.linuxcnc.org/ There is a Link on the left to download a burnable CD Image "Live-CD" after making the Bootable CD you can use it to boot up on and run demo EMC2 without changing anything on your computer. Very cool software we just retrofited a 3 axis mill here works great and we are only using an old 933cpu computer with 512mb ram.

Good Luck on your Mission.
DJ
Omaha, NE
USA

[Kimbal]

Originally Posted by machinehop5 Welcome to CNCZone. You may want to look into using EMC2 for software. It's free and very flexible. Heres the website http://www.linuxcnc.org/ There is a Link on the left to download a burnable CD Image "Live-CD" after making the Bootable CD you can use it to boot up on and run demo EMC2 without changing anything on your computer. Very cool software we just retrofited a 3 axis mill here works great and we are only using an old 933cpu computer with 512mb ram. Good Luck on your Mission. DJ Omaha, NE USA

Thanks for that. I'll look into it.