Luthier CNC

[bluesking]

Been a little while since I last posted but progress has been made. Almost finished and very pleased - things all worked pretty much to plan, even the electronics and software.

1) Made a simple 400x400mm MDF enclosure for the control box. 3D printed some connection panels so I can change the interface in future if necessary. Bit of spare clear acrylic for the top.


2) Spent about 50 hours of bench time to wire the control box. Surprised at how long this took - thought it would be simpler but I was testing individual functions as I went to make sure it all integrated OK.


3) A lot of the bench time was spent preparing cables and connectors. Here's all of the prepared cable ready to go into the workshop:


4) Back in the workshop, attaching the drag chain to some 3d printed mounts:


5) Attaching various homing and limit switches, once again on 3d printed mounts. Laying cable in the drag chain.


6) Here is the basically complete machine!


Heres a quick vid of the machine doing some initial rapids. Spindle yet to go on, but I'm getting 9000mm/min on the X & Y axes before servos stall. Thats setup for a theoretical precision of around 1/1000th of a mm with the encoders I have and running the UC400ETH at 200kHz. Obviously that precision is pretty goofy, I was just erring on the side of caution - still there is plenty reason to think I can squeeze a bit more speed and torque from this setup after a bit of experimentation and tuning.

https://streamable.com/orect

There is still spindle mounting and some tuning to do for precise axis scaling and servo PID controller tuning. After that I'll be moving on to spoil board, jigs and dust extraction.