Well it’s been nearly four years since I started to look at building my own machine, my interest started because I was looking for an alternative to using chemicals for making printed circuit boards, after finding a home built CNC controlled PCB engraver on Ebay I started searching and soon found CNC building forums like this one.

After reading a lot of the threads I started to design my own machine using Autocad, because my initial interest was PCB’s I was only looking to build a small machine , I started to acquire various bits, the first being three Gecko 210 stepper drivers and three Nema 34 stepper motors.

Fortunately for me (or unfortunately depending which way you look at it) I work in a factory which uses quite a bit of automation and over a period of time I have acquired a lot of very lightly used ball screw assemblies, linear rail and carriages and aluminium extrusion which has dictated the final size of my machine and already with bigger sections becoming available as I write this I am redesigning it already.

I built all the electrical/electronics first. My power supply is home built giving me around 50 volts dc to power my steppers and capable of delivering around 16 amps. Although I have had my machine running it is still very much work in progress, I have purchased a MPG, a small PLC with MODBUS capability to give me more I/O and also I have just received a three phase water cooled spindle and VFD all of which require fitting and setting up . Anyway that’s enough of me babbling on, as they say a picture paints a thousand words here are a few photo’s, I have also taken some video of it cutting some MDF nothing exciting so once I figure out how to upload it I will do so.

Specs at the moment:-

X Axis 650mm
Y Axis 650mm
Z Axis 200mm

5mm Pitch Ball Screws On All Axis
Hiwin 25mm Rails And Carriages on X and Z Axis
Hiwin 30mm Rails And Carriages on The Y Axis
Gecko 210 Stepper Drivers
3Nm Stepper Motors On All Axis
CNC4PC 11T BOB And the C10

Mach 3

Regards

Andy