Help needed to choose a machine.

[Lee Roberts]

Hiya, welcome to the forum!

Building your own machine should yield more bang for your buck yes.

1. First think about what you want to cut, most people say "wood, plastics and aluminium now and again", guess what, that covers pretty much everything dose it not, the answer to this is the same though, have a good look though the machine build logs here on the forum, the matrial you want to cut predominantly, should determine the type of machine you want to build, see answer 2 for links to the options.

Once your ready to dream up a machine idea, start a new thread in the correct general sub forum: Gantry/Router Machines or Milling Machines and use this as your public "note pad" to ask questions, post your designs and hash out everything you need to before you buy or start building something, especially before you start buying new components.

Now your ready to start a build log or a conversion log and show us all what YOU can do

2. You can find discussion on moving gantry/router style machine builds in the DIY Router Build Logs, or if your looking towards a traditional Mill type machine, you can find those discussions in the Milling Machines, Builds & Conversions forum, typically members looking at this type of machine do a conversion of a manual commercial machine, however there have been some very nice "start from nothing" builds, my personal favorite is the DIY CNC Milling Machine From Scratch machine by "totts".

3. First lets sort out what your building, then we know what you need and who its best to get it from, generally you'll need Stepper Motors, the Nema23 3.1Nm units from CNC4YOU are what most people use for most machines, CNC4YOU are the best price for these as you cant really save any money importing them from China, unless you can get a discount on them at the point of ordering other components, linear rail, bearings etc, this brings me on to recommending a company called BST Automation trading from Aliexpress, have a look around their web shop you'll get the idea, the price's are not quite the lowest available on Aliexpress from other sellers BUT when you buy from BST your very much buying a service you can rely as well as the products.

4. Software is wide open really and I think becomes a personal choice after trying a few different flavours, if you've £20k to buy Solidworks start there, if like many of us your doing this as a hobby or enthusiast, you wouldn't go far wrong looking at Fusion360 from Autodesk, its free to use for hobby use and also has its own CAM solution, giving a design to manufacturing workflow out of the box.

For an ongoing list of available software, the community has compiled a list here: List of CAD/CAM Software, I point people at 360 generally over others, you get a lot for nothing (cost).

5. They've probably been asked already, dont worry about asking silly questions, this action has driven some of the best discussions on the forum previously and while it gets repetitive....WE LOVE IT !

Welcome to the forum Sean and good luck with your journey !

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