Warco Major CNC build log

[Robin Hewitt]

I added the belt covers on the X, Y and Z motors.

The factory fitted screws holding the z axis motor together stopped 3mm short of the base. Not much but enough to hold a flexi conduit fixing so I could tidy the wiring up.

If I'm doing pretties I must be nearly there. The ultimate aim is to cut injection tooling, so thought I'd try the fast spindle and instantly found I needed yet another belt cover :heehee:

I cut a 3mm slot 0.5mm deep across a piece of aluminium at 6100rpm. A fairly good mirror finish resulted except the centre of the cut where the tool proved a mere approximation to centre cutting

Extreme close up of the cut below. I measured the width at 3.00 to 3.01mm so runout is around 5um, not bad considering the ER11 collet was only finger tight.

Next the electronics...

I currrently run DOS because it leaves the PC timer interrupt free which is nice. OTOH, new computers do better graphics, are much faster and prettier, even if serial and paralel ports have now both been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Obviously I need a processor on t' mill end of the wire. I am opting for a Freescale 8 bit micro running C. It comes in a dinky little 48MHz, 64 pin, square package with buckets of I/O pins, 32k of flash, 2k of RAM, timers, serial port for the phase converter and a full speed USB 2 connection for the PC link. (Real reason for this choice is that our tech bod is looking at it for another product so we already have all the dev kit, programmer and free samples) :naughty: