Aluminium Extrusion CNC Router Build

[joshendy]

So first up is the electronics enclosure. I had a look around for an affordable case but wow for the most part they are incredibly expensive. So I thought what the hell, good first project for my CNC. I had heaps of left over 50x25x1.5 aluminium 'L' shaped extrusion and a big sheet of 3mm thick HDPE I didn't end up needing.

So I went and brought a cheap rivet gun and went to work. I CNC'd the front case door out of 5mm PVC, the rest of the case was CNC'd out of the 3mm black HDPE. It came out bloody well I reckon, my fabrication teacher would have been proud.

Anyways here are some pictures of it and some of my cyclonic dust collection setup.

[joshendy]

After I got the electronics enclosure done I wanted to get right onto getting rid of my temporary MDF mount and get atleast an HDPE one on there. So I drew up a design in CAD. I've got a small hole in the mount where I'll mount a cross laser for zero'ing the machine, plus they just look cool. The mount will also have some tapped holes in bottom where the dust shoe will mount.

So I got out some 25mm thick HDPE and let the CNC go to town on it and here is the result:

[joshendy]

Lastly my dust shoe. I never imagined the amount of swarf and dust that would be ejected during cutting. It still amazes me everytime I do a cut on the CNC, I don't think I'll ever get all the HDPE chips out of my work shed!

So a dust shoe was the top priority. I saw the Kent CNC dust shoe and was quite impressed with the whole shoe and skirt design and how they easy connect/disconnect with magnets.

The dust shoe is made out of 10mm acrylic and I'm using small 5x3mm rare earth magnets. Six magnets in the shoe and six in each skirt which attaches to the dust shoe.

Very impressed with the end result. I wasted a fair bit of acrylic on failed attempts, I had to do double sided machining for the skirt, one side needed pockets for the magnets, the other side an 8mm slot for the flexible brush strip to press in to.

But I got it done and here is a quick video and as always the pictures. (Sorry the pics aren't in order, can't figure out how to order them correctly)

Plus theres an extra little video of my CNC I put in there. I've got myself a new HD camera so I'll be sure to put up some new higher resolution videos of the CNC doing some proper cuts soon.

[Karl]

Recommendations/suggestions please for UK suppliers of flexible brush strip in various lengths and various brush heights. Intention is to copy the idea of having different dust extraction shoes for different jobs.

Thanks

Karl

[joshendy]

looks a tidy machine josh,its the sort of design i wish id gone for but using profile rail,would love to see some guitars being cut when you get round to it.
im hopeing to do a few vids myself in the next few weeks.

Thanks! Yea I'll definitely be using round profile rail for my next build. I'm still in the design phase of getting the guitar together but I'm hoping I can film a good deal of the cutting and post a nice vid up and a quick overview of the process and then finally me playing it!

Do I spy a DIY cyclone bucket vacuum thingy there?

Awesome work all round, looks really good!

Thanks! Haha yep thats a DIY cyclone bucket, threw it together quite quickly. It catches all the big swarf but a lot of the fine particle stuff still makes it to the vac and clogs the filter. The bucket is just too small and the intake port is too close to the port going out to the vac. I'll be building a larger one eventually which I'm sure will do better, but my current one does the trick for now.

Cheers,
Josh