Beavermill conversion to CNC

Hey everyone,

I am a metalworker professionally and as my hobby. I always wanted to have a CNC milling machine.
Hearing the prices of repairs on our CNC machines at work , I gave up my ambition to buy one.
Then I met some people who build their CNC by themselves.Then the idea came to me to rebuild my old Beaver Mill .
A decade ago I bought a Beaver Mill VBRP.
After standing in a corner of my workshop all this time, I put him back in the spotlights. The idea is to convert him into a CNC Mill.
Last Saturday I started cleaning him.
I will let you know how the rebuilding goes along.

Here are a few foto's from before the clean up;

Welcome to the mad house,
I think JohnS has a beaver mill or is in favour of them.

peter

That's a nice thing to have standing in the corner of the workshop (Actually, It'd be quite nice to have a workshop with a spare corner!)

I suggest you look at ball-screws rather than using the existing lead-screws (for X and Y), with servo motors, rather than steppers, for a machine of that size.

Are you thinking of motorising the knee or just the quill?

Hello everyone,
On Sunday I managed to partially disassemble the Beaver and to clean the table so it is presentable again.
I already had a ball-screw for the Z axis from a CNC mill that was refurbished.
And I am planning to change the X and Y axes with ball-screws as well.
Does anybody know which are the best axial bearings with zero tolerance
and preloaded so that I don't need belleville washers.
I don't know what they use in real CNC mills as axial bearing.
Kind regards ,
Andre.

Good pics Andre! I think a lot of the blokes on here like Beavers especially John! I am sure he will chime in with some advice soon.
Will

On sunday I did some more work on it.
I removed the elecktricity so we can put some new on later.
Disassembled the turret and cleaned the coolant tank which was full off slurry . Dirty work it was.
We also discoverd a tag with an award from the Queen.
And as you can see the year is 1967 so I presume it is build in the same year.

On Wednesday I cleaned the body with prepaint and put some paint on it.
yesterday we cleaned some parts off the turret.
Today we did some milling on the ram so if at a later date I want to make a toolchange or something else than there is already a plane and holes to bolted it on.
also on the rear I made some holes to connect a high speed motor.
Later today we painted the turred and started some milling on the table console .

Hi Andre,

That is some serious equipment! Thankyou for sharing this project with us - I will be reading along with interest...

Hello Tom,
Serious jobs demands serious equipment.
It is not always easy when you only have small machines.
Yet many of you are also making beautiful pieces with small machines .

Last week I had a lot of work with scraping the verticale slider mounting surface. on the link below you can see real pro's at work.
http://www.moriseiki.com/dixi/englis.../scraping.html
I did some assembling from the turret.And I found a protection for the Z axis.