Thinking of buying/building machine for PCB milling

[HankMcSpank]

HankMcSpank: What would you recommend for milling PCBs?

A moving table design (i.e. fixed gantry)...this is style of machine is problematic to source because most CNC offerings are moving gantry.
No larger than 30cm in either X or Y plane (to keep associated frame/table vibrations lower)
Ballscrews - absolutely essential
Homing switches - virtually essential.

I could only find one manufacturer where I could buy to the above spec new (vs building my own)...

2013 new design desktop cnc router machine RS-3020 for aluminum, View desktop cnc router machine, Redsail Product Details from Jinan Redsail Tech Co., Ltd. on Alibaba.com (it costs about $1200 ...which is great value, but of course there'd be shipping & taxes on that)





(nb: my machine above is presently showing a standard 300W air cooled spindle, pending fitting a water cooled spindle over the coming days - hence all the black cables & tubing dangling in mid air near the spindle!!)

...it's the machine I ended up buying (& believe me...I went to the far end of a fart sourcing a machine that will mill pcbs well).

Sure, it's a Chinese machine but far superior to the standard Chinese CNC fayre ....it uses 3 individual decent stepper drivers (e.g. instead of a YooCnC '3 in 1' nasty driver pcb).... http://www.moonsindustries.com/Produ...t_E/SR4_drive/ The gantry uprights are 15mm thick aluminium (very solid), ballscrews...the machine is very very zippy. The machine comes fitted with homing switches (which most don't - ok, not a show stopper, but nicer to have them fitted at the factory)...water cooled spindle etc. it also has one of those cable tidy thingymajigs fitted to allow the cabling to move with the axises neatly)

You can maybe source in the UK from Redsail Cutting Plotter,Laser Cutting Machine,Laser Engraving Machine ...but I don't think they have that particular machine listed (& therefore presumably not in stock)

If your intended purpose is to mill pcbs, then I'd also say to buy CNC-USB vs. mach3 ...as the former has specific integrated features that make milling pcbs much less painful (auto Z levelling, camera point transformations to assist with double sided pcb registration etc)