A Hello from Leeds

Hi,

I am a jeweller in Leeds specialising in cufflinks and a few months ago had the sales guys from most of the big names in my workshop showing us off engraving equipment. My initial thoughts were from the machines were they were overpriced poor man's limited capability CNC machines. I also had a look at a CNC Machine at a trade fair and was mightily impressed but way out of my league at the moment.

Looking for a cheap solution, I started coming across conversions of the Proxxon MF70. From my research I can see the main complaint is the lax of movement on the Y axis but as I very rarely make anything over 20mm that is not an issue for us.

Its been on the back burner for a while, but the other week I saw a Proxxon MF70 , motors and control board up on ebay and won the auction. I also ordered the mounts and spent today in my workshop putting it together. Unfortunately the power supply and board seem totally dead, so I am awaiting replacements.

Looking forward to getting started with this. First off I just want to concentrate on getting the engraving side sorted but curious about how well it would work with jewellers wax so I can do castings.

Always happy to meet for a beer if anyone in the area wants a CNC chat

Regards

Chance

How do im from bradford ive not been running my cnc long but have had decent results carving photos to wood would be interested to see what you can do when you get set up

Hi,

Not to put you off but I would have thought that Proxon's wouldn't have the accuracy you'd need and the spindle runout would be limiting to fine detail.

Like you say the price they want for these small jeweller type machines is Madness and for a small machine it wouldn't be hard or stupidly expensive to build a 4 or 5 axis machine like the Roland JWX machines that could hold very high detail.
I've built much larger machines that needed to hold high detail and work to fine resolution, Machine I built for Micheal Marino's for instance works to tight tolerences machining harmonica combs in plastics so a machine with a much smaller cutting area wouldn't be hard or ridiculously expensive.

If you don't have any success with the proxon drop me a line and I'll gladly help you.

That sounds pretty interesting re the photos in wood. Are you using different depths to get tone ?

JazzCNC

Will keep you in mind, under no delusions of having a production scale machine, but hoping I have something that will get us learning the basics and understanding CNC

No the photos in wood are actually 3d (or 2.5d) releifs