My steel framed router

[pavlo]

Next step involved spending some more money. So I spoke to Gary at Zapp and ordered 3 nema 23, 3nm steppers and drivers plus power supplies and breakout board. An old pc case was scrounged and I put it together like this.




Looking at the price of motor mounts scared me so I got some more scrap and made these.




Which, when painted looked quite good.



I needed a mount for the Kress spindle I bought so I got my £20 B+Q router out and set to work on more scrap. When it was all put together it looked like this.





A gift of a decent spec pc with a parallel port meant that I could start to get it working. I installed mach3, plugged it all in and told the program it was 400 steps per mm on all axis. I expected to be doing a log of tinkering and tuning to get it to run well so I was very pleased when it all ran flawlessly. All axis jogged at full speed without any problems at all and the acceleration I could get amazed me, I ended up turning it down a bit because the kitchen table it was set up on for testing was shaking too much (yes my wife is a saint).



I have still got to connect limit switches and and e stop button but I thought I would give it a go.



YouTube"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhKl0S1JVds



YouTube"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7uFgeNTnZE


So thats it. It took about 4 months of grabbing the odd hour here or there to get it done but now I have a good, strong working router for about £1000.



Now all I need to do is find something to do with it.