Hi from eastern France !

Hi all !

I'm a 48 year old (damn already ? time flies... sigh...) guy from eastern France (near Besançon) currently renovating an old water mill (hydroelectric project) after having previously worked 15 years in the IT banking sector (which I left around 2010)

I've always been keen on building "stuff", any stuff raging from woodworking (cedar strip canoes for example) to metal working (machining, welding, etc)

I created a firm in 2010 to buy some cnc machining equipment (yeah I know, that's "cheating" :highly_amused: ).
I have a HAAS mini mill 2 (508 x 406 x 356 travels) with a 20 tools changer and a 4th axis and a HAAS SL10 lathe with the big bore option (let you work from 50mm bar stock), so I have "some" experience in cnc machining, at least from the user side... I mostly machine some mild steel (42CD4 and such) and quit a bit of hardened steel (love working with toolox 33 and 44).

Also own all the usual crap you have lying around a shop (started buying when I was in my early teens, would go mow the neighbors lawn for pocket money just to buy.. tools...), grinders, plasma cutter, welders (oxy-acetelyne, TIG and MAG), various woodworking machines, just bought at an auction a 1650mm x 850mm x 230mm DIN DIN876/0 granite surface plate I need to go "pick" up), etc..

Alas no matter how much you have in a shop there's always something missing, hence I have this crazy (?) idea about building two different extra cnc machines, I'm pretty autonomous when it comes to building the structures but the actual cnc part (those pesky servos and BOB and whatever else there is in that long list is where I'm mostly (ok totally) clueless), I need to build two machines :

- A "high Z axis travel" router table (this is to make PU foam and MDF (medium density fiberboard) casting parts, and some finishing work on aluminium allows) so aiming for a 1250mm x 1250mm x 500mm work "cube" (this is mostly for our hydroelectric project on the mill for now, I don't need huge precision, 0.01mm positioning will be fine, but I would like it to be capable of light cuts in Aluminium alloys so rigidity is a must.

- A fairly specific turret type ID/OD grinder (I currently outsource my grinding requirements, it's a PITA, not to mention quit expensive for my type of parts....).

I'll make a specific thread on these projects starting with the ID/OD grinder (more urgent) since this is the "Hi all" zone not the "How the hell do I proceed ?" zone.

Regards to all
Serge

Welcome to the forum

Your project sounds interesting. You should find plenty of help on the electrics side so don’t worry about that. When you are ready post up a sketch in the build section.
Holding 0.01 mm on a machine 1250x1250 and close to 500 drop in Z could be a challenge though.

You should have a big head start thanks to your previous experience.I would caution that a very large Z axis travel may be of limited value.Draw the motor you plan to use and include the longest feasible cutter.Then draw a line from the edge of the cutter and tangential to the motor body and this will give an idea of the steepest face that can be machined.It gets worse on the side of the motor that attaches to the Z axis.

Thanks for the advice, for the router it's not so much the Z travel itself that needs to be long but the Z clearance, basically I need to able to machine at most about 75 mm deep (hence travel of 150 at least for tool clearance) but on parts that can be 100mm to 450mm thick (where the top gets machined) but I do not need to be able to do both at the same time, so a solution might be to have an adjustable table height or simply a high gantry style router and use table risers for the low parts to bring them up to the Z axis..
Definitely still a work in progress...

I'll probably start with the grinder though, kind of more urgent for me

Anyways I'm going to start on the grinder first because that's the one that is more urgent to my needs

Welcome to the forum Serge.

Looking forward to the build threads that I hope you will be creating . . . .

It's a pity you don't live in the UK where a few of the guys could pop over to help you pickup that granite surface plate. ;-)

Andy

Yeah I should be going to get that this week, I'm like a kid in a candy store about it :yahoo: :yahoo: :yahoo: