I wanted to create a series of desktop (or a little larger) sized CNC machines with interchangeable parts. The idea is to be able to build a series of CNC machines that share many of the same components.

A little History

A couple years ago, I built a small desktop CNC router that I called Titan. It was designed to hold a full sized router or spindle.
It had a moving table for gantry rigidity with many of the parts cut out of Corian and tempered hardboard. Eventually, most of these components were replaced
with aluminum, as seen in many of my Working With Aluminum series.

CNC Construction Set-_mg_6222-jpg

Titan, sported a 3HP water colled spindle and served me well for cutting all kinds of parts. Titan wasn't without issues though. I used unsupported 20 mm shafts as rails. These worked ok but I wanted a desktop machine that was as rigid as my KRMx02 machines.
I decided to take the machine apart to replace the unsupported rails with supported ones.

The CNC Construction Set was Born

When I started to rebuild the machine, I decided to change things up a little. I found that many of the components could be reused and, with some design changes, I could build a foundation that would work for several similar sized CNC machine types.

Note that it is my end goal to gather enough information to start a book series, that will allow others to build their own CNC construction set.

As I move forward with my research and design, I will try different things. You are welcome to join me via the write-ups I will be posting here.
KronosRobotics CNC Construction Set

I will be making mistakes and back tracking as I experiment, for this reason these pages are not meant as step by step directions or the final design.

The machines I want to build using the CNC Construction Set include:

CNC Plasma Cutter
CNC Heavy Duty Router
CNC 3D Printer
CNC Laser Engraver
CNC Drag Knife
CNC Pen Plotter
CNC Plate Marker


The First Prototype

Here are some acceleration tests for my first prototype. I'm testing for axis wiggle.


The particular variation will be a plasma cutter, plate marker, drag knife and light duty engraver/router. It is designed for High Gs and low load.

Later the gantry will be designed to hold my 3HP Spindle.

See the full write up here

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