New build with recycled parts on a ridiculous budget 120cm*60cm work area

I did some basic cad so I can work out the mounting plates so I can either manufacture them myself or get them manufactured but unfortunately my decent computer is at work at moment so had to use the old laptop which doesn't support decent quality renders so this is the basic rendering made everything different colours to make it easy to see what's going on.

Need to add the ballscrews in of course and motor mounts but this laptop is so slow, will worry about z axis when I've actually build it ;)

Glad I started to cad out as I already see a few things I should tweak winging it was a stupid idea lol.

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Eyeing up cheap ass T6600 drivers and breakout board for control instead of the arduino but maybe I should slum it with the arduino for now and get a better controller. Certainly Arduino, cnc shield and Polou drivers will be enough to test the machine.

I think I will make custom T nuts so I can offset the hole to align with the Supported rail mounts to ease mounting.

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I think me and my friend can make them with his router table but I will probably have them cnc milled to make my life easy to get everything straight.

The other choice is have the extrusion drilled through accurately and then bolt through the extrusion. This might be cheaper BUT I intend to swap the supported rail for new rail at some point and the rail I have now has a different (Wider) mount to standard supported rail. So I end up with holes where I don't want them.

I mixed up my understanding of milling and router machines so this is in the wrong place but hey hoe ;)


Starting work on my z axis ;)
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Which means I'm is stripping so I can sort rebuilding this. Getting the bearings out will be fun ;) I do want to reuse these as they be far better quality than anything I would buy.

I need to get a proper plan for rebuilding this sorted as it's obviously very important lol.

Should I use 3 bearing blocks instead of 2? For the supported rail, I had a lucky find on the aluminium extrusion side which means I can build it with 1.2m supported rails but only 1m ballscrew (actual travel ~85cm) so I can easily put 3 bearings per slide without affecting travel.

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Ballscrews are in Standstead ;) so hopefully Monday they will arrive although we shall see how much import tax we get.

Tracking shows they did nothing for a week and then in 2 days it's here I wonder in future if I can pay a little extra for Fedex not to sit on it for a week lol.

I ordered them on the 28th took a week for the Chinese to organise fedex then a week for fedex to collect lol and then air mail in 2 days without the 14 days of mucking about they would have been super quick.

I ordered other stuff from china since that came quicker in the normal ems post lol.

Ballscrews came ;) So Saturday will be play day and then Sunday cad day and Monday start getting the plates made for mounting everything.

Ballscrews were packed extremely well with plywood to keep them straight very happy with purchase and NO IMPORT TAX!!! So very happy.

Ordered 2 nema 23 1.9nm motors, got m4 tee nuts for the 15mm Hiwin's (This was annoying as I have a couple of hundred M5's) and ordered A2 M4 machine screws to mount the Hiwin's as screwfix and toolstation don't have the right size I hope I got it right lol but £2 I can afford to order more if not.

Next make mounting plate, then back down KJN to cut my axis with the Z on it then make the z axis/mount I'm going to make the mount for the z axis directly into the z axis.

Still need that spindle but hopefully next week I can afford to order.

At moment I've got a lot of bits for a cnc machine so I need to turn it from bits into the base of an actual machine lol.

I'm predicting the cost with spindle for everything to be ~£800 so still well under my "X carve" budget but well over my lets make it for free lol.

I suppose I should buy some microswitches eyeing up the Sanwa's (These are proper arcade microswitchs) figure it's worth spending a bit more for repeatability I found cheap microswithces on my 3d printer to be less than perfect lol.
https://www.arcadeworlduk.com/produc...terminals.html

I might use Inductive sensors instead though but that takes some thinking about orientation so I can use the aluminium frame to home the cnc.

I find the Carlsberg export is essential to any machine build lol especially on a Friday night ;)Attachment 21737

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The ballscrews were packaged properly
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I love how tight the hiwin rails are (I paid £100 for 4 blocks, 1500mm long 2 rails) they're lovely to slide but I do worry 15mm is too flimsy.

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Originally Posted by Desertboy

I did some basic cad so I can work out the mounting plates so I can either manufacture them myself or get them manufactured but unfortunately my decent computer is at work at moment so had to use the old laptop which doesn't support decent quality renders so this is the basic rendering made everything different colours to make it easy to see what's going on.

Need to add the ballscrews in of course and motor mounts but this laptop is so slow, will worry about z axis when I've actually build it ;)

Glad I started to cad out as I already see a few things I should tweak winging it was a stupid idea lol.

Attachment 21495

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Seems it would be better to built the gantry spanning the shorter width of the machine? Any particular reason you are building it that way around?

Gantry tends to be the weak point in terms of allowing flex, the shorter the span the more rigid it will be for any given thickness/extrusion type.