3 Axis 900x500mm

[Wal]

Over the last few weeks I've been hanging out in Clive's garage after taking him up on his offer to help me cut the larger plates and assemble a new router to compliment the mini-mill I built a couple of years back - that machine's still going strong and I'm making some good work with it, but I really do need a bit of extra cutting area (my ultimate goal is to build my own bass guitar from scratch - despite already having eleven of 'em - it's a big part of getting into the whole CNC thing for me).

Clive's done the heavy lifting here - the only area where I managed to make a significantly greater contribution than him was in the biscuit eating and tea drinking department (thanks Mary..!)



The design is a tweaked version of a tried and tested router he built a while back - there's also been a great deal of CAD/CAM input from Dean, to whom I'm hugely grateful.

It's based on the heavy duty Motedis extrusions which I ordered from Germany.



A fairly conventional build - the hardware is made up of the usual suspects:

• 1610 ballscrews on the X/Y with a 1605 on the Z all mounted on the BK/BF bearings blocks. The X and Y axis are geared 1:1.5 (20T pulley on the motor 30T pulley on the screw) while the Z remains 1:1.
• Profile rails are HIWIN HR20s.
• I'll be using AM882 drivers.
• Standard water-cooled 2.2KW spindle with a Huanyang VFD.
• Machine control will be via the newer version of Linux CNC (I get on with it and it looks so much nicer than Mach).

Not sure on the BOB as yet and still undecided on a computer to run it off - I have a (very) old Windows box which I could re-purpose, or I could take a leaf out of Clive's book and squirrel away a MOBO into the control box (nice idea!). Ideally I'd love to run this off a laptop as it would mean no extra monitor to accommodate around the machine - Clive's pointed out that this can lead to issues, such as certain power saving features kicking in (that you have little/no control over) - but I'm totally open to advice here..!

There have been a couple of hiccups along the way - a couple of holes in the wrong place, a ball-nut coming off the end of a ball-screw, but nothing that's fazed Clive - in fact, I re-packed the ball-nut myself and was surprised to learn that it's not that big a deal - I was gutted when it happened, but sit tight, be patient, pop them in methodically and you can have it sorted in half an hour.

Here's a short vid of the machine semi-assembled over at Clive's. The X slides easily as it's not back-feeding against the screw (the ball-nut mount needed shimming so was left unattached). The gantry will get detached for transporting back to mine at some point next week.



It's coming together. I've been busy making some of the smaller bits and pieces on my mill:





And here's a vid showing some of the cutting that went in to these smaller parts. I've taken to using a drilling strategy to cut out large chunks out of the stock so as to avoid deep slotting. I can deep slot, but I'm not a fan - it can get a bit loud for a confined space and it means using a fair bit of WD40 which I'd sooner avoid. The spindle bracket was cut dry, ok - the odd squirt of WD during the drilling routine, but the profiles themselves were cut using only air.



I'll hopefully darken Clive's doorstep again (if he hasn't tired of me by then) to cut the mounting holes for the spindle bracket - it's a bit too tall for my mill when stood on end.

That's about it for now. I have some video of Clive's machine cutting the larger plates - it needs editing down a bit, but I'll get something up in the not too distant.

There's still plenty to do - homing switches, e-chain, electrics/electronics. In fact there's probably a couple of months left before it's up and running properly - as ever, it's the small things that end up taking time...

I'll post anything of interest as I go...

Wal.