StrikeCNC Machine - My Retrofit

Hey guys,

After buying shite from Strike CNC, I've spent the last year fixing it along with a bit of upgrading to cheer myself up too! Starting this thread to just give myself a bit of motivation and something to look forward to as its nearly complete and should be cutting very soon.

Here's the original turd I got from the anus at Strike. And yep I know, millions of problems and only just up to the task of cutting air (bit of an exaggeration but its not far off the truth)

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After the first disaster the main area of concern was the gantry and Z axis. So back off to Strike and flushed some more money down the toilet to have them 'upgraded'. Threw out the Kress spindle and got one of the 2.2kw chinese WC ones whilst I was at it.

Here's the new gantry. Much better than the last with 200x40 extrusion. Happy with that.

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It wasn't all good news though because Strike, true to form, botched the new Z axis. Might look fine on these shots but you couldn't correctly tighten the supported rails due to mickey mouse engineering - result = play at the cutter.

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So off comes the Z axis and I have a new front plate made to try solve the problem of not being able to tighten the supported rail. This works fine but then I realise despite ordering a machine with 200mm of Z travel I only really have about 175mm. Making it very tight for some of the jobs I have in mind. Thanks for that Strike. So I think sod it, I'll design my own. Can't be that hard can it.

Here's the result...

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Bit over engineered for the machine with 25mm linear rails and a 25mm thick ecocast front plate but overkill never hurts. It does slow you down though so will no doubt have to dial the speeds/acceleration back a tad after this but I'd rather do that and have accuracy with a good finish.

And on the machine:

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Looks good so far, happy with that. You can also spot the X and Y ballscrews in those shots. These now have the correct ballscrews mounts with angular contact bearings instead of the Strike's cheap substitute - round rail supports with captured regular chinese ballrace bearings. Those will slop about like crazy with a bit of wear on them. Strike may now be out of business but Merchant Dice use the same method in some of their machines so watch out for that.

The electronics, whilst functional in the original Strike machine, weren't giving me the speeds I'd have liked. These were upgraded for better Leadshine AM882 drives along with higher volts (75v). What wasn't acceptable was the dangerous wiring job by Strike. Things like the 240v wired through the e-stop, bare wire hanging out of screw contacts, broken wire insulation exposing dangerous DC voltages, no cabinet ground and incorrect colour coding on wiring. It was a death trap basically and would never have passed any sort of safety test.

So I ripped the lot out and started from scratch with standard and sound safety practices such as e-stop on relays, home/limit switches, star grounding, cable management etc.

Strike's attempt:

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After the upgrade:

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I upgraded all the stepper wiring to shielded whilst I was at it too. Nothing more annoying than RF and EMI noise problems and the WC spindle can give off a fair bit of that.

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Couple of simple convenience mods. LCD on an swivel arm so I can see Mach wherever I am.

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And to the rear of the dust enclosure Strike supplied the machine incomplet! The doors were missing at the back. The whole idea of a dust enclosure is to keep dust out the workshop... missing doors isn't going to help that. I came up with something anyway but space was tight so went with folding doors.

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Not quite done yet though. I'm having a complete strip down of the bed, gantry and z axis done.

Once finished the bed will have a lot more support, bit more bracing on the gantry and everything will be square and true. I'll be cutting after that. Woop at last!

Still, a bit of tweaking is to be expected. At least the steppers were ok. ;)

Looking at the quality of work you have done its a shame you did not build it all in the first place. Congrats on actually producing that silk purse from a strikes ear. Nice work.

One thing I would recommend is to add another beam across the front of the machine like this:



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My build is similar to yours and I found that the machine was twisting slightly and this solved the problem. Its much more rigid now.

Thanks guys.

Regarding the bed. There's plenty more support going in there along with a 10mm thick alu plate covering the 1480 x 1410 area.