Diy CNC mill-router-thing in my attic

[Pencilfish]

Finally got round to posting some pictures of my homebuilt CNC, which lives in the attic extension of our Edinburgh flat.


While it's technically my second go at making a CNC router/mill thing, the first attempt used regular threaded rod for linear motion and only ever managed to draw a wobbly circle with a pen. As I still didn't know very much, and had a pretty tight budget when I began designing this one about 3 years ago, the design evolved quite a lot, depending on what parts were cheap and available. It runs using three 1.89 Nm steppers, which gives me pretty slow rapids, but otherwise seem to provide more than adequate torque for cutting. Inside the boxy and probably overbuilt Z axis is a standard Chinese 2.2kw water-cooled spindle, which seems to cope with machining Aluminium and a little mild steel pretty well, but is really lacking torque at low speeds with endmill sizes 10mm+.
(to my surprise) it can usually hold tolerances of ~0.05mm, sometimes a little more if I'm careful or if what I'm making is a convenient shape.

Probably the biggest mistake I made while designing it was making the many of the bolts in the X-carriage inaccessible without completely disassembling the whole thing, meaning that upgrades or just maintenance on the X axis far harder than it should be. So eventually, I'll probably have to make or buy a proper machine with sensible rails and ballscrews. But this works for now!

[AndreaRotela]

Oh my God. What is that?