Clarke milling machine CNC conversion CMD1225D

[Clive S]

If you want an angle grinder give me a shout ..Clive

[John S]

Aldi have some in £18 each, picked a couple up today.

Mind you if you want it milling off give me a shout.

[Jonathan]

Thanks for the offers. Turns out my CNC Router is happy enough cutting cast iron so I'm just using that now. I'm using a 6mm single flute cutter, as they take about 5 mins to regrind if it's damaged. I've set it to 1mm doc, 70% stepover, 250mm/min at 4000rpm and it seems fine. Going to take an hour to take 3mm off both ends of the bed, which isn't too bad.

I've made the motor and bearing mounts for the X-axis, so once this bed is milled it should all fit together...

[Jonathan]

Getting there...

[Jonathan]

I've assembled the X-axis now:

Unfortunately I'm still waiting for the pulleys to arrive, so I've temporarily put some spare XL pulleys I had lying around on it. Since using the pulleys I had means the bigger pulley had to go on the motor, it's currently 30:14 ratio so it'll currently go silly fast - over 10m/min!

Oddly there's still 0.02mm (0.0008") of backlash... not sure what's causing it yet, I'm hoping it's just the pulleys so I'll look into it further when I've got the new ones.

[natec]

I know this is an old thread but I was just given one of these and thinking about converting it mostly for machining aluminum. Do you still have the machine? Any thoughts about it?

[Jonathan]

I still use it most weekends. It's a surprisingly good machine for the size, I think due to having substantial bed slides then for example an X3. If you're looking for a machine to fit on a workbench, I'd certainly recommend it.

Here it is milling a keyway in a titanium shaft:

About the only change I've made to the machine recently is to add a spacer block of steel under the column, to drill the end of this shaft:

Some general milling of aluminium: