Yet another gantry CNC router.

[cambesol]

Congrats, its a VERY nice build, well done! I can imagine lots of hours going into those great looking alu parts! I just love the neat looks of an all aluminium build. Very good suggestion by Silyavski, maybe put a little block of wood or plastic to hard stop it just to prevent it running off the rails if required and ditch the lower Z switch.

Thanks! From start to finish has been around eighteen months which included the control system and liquid cooling. The machining took around 9 months but this is only five hours per week due to work/family commitments. I prefer face-milled aluminium rather than lots of extrusion because it looks nice. Not the fastest way to go, but worth it in the end. It does have a hard-stop, the spindle will not drop onto the table.

Sorry, I don't want to stray too far from the topic but since you have first hand experience, whats your opinion of LinuxCNC so far?

I use Linux a lot (I develop embedded software, drivers etc running on Linux of all flavours) so for me it was a natural choice. I really like LinuxCNC, the work flow I described in the first post has yielded good results although I haven't produced anything that I want to post on this forum yet due to the f*****g limit switch causing random paths to be followed (design flaw, please don't ask - too embarrassing). Today I have drawn up some replacement parts made in acrylic which should fix the problem. I will post a picture when I have my final test piece finished this week.

Linux is not for everyone as it can be frustrating trying to figure out what you need to know to fix a problem. LinuxCNC, once configured, works very well indeed.

In a few months I want to dig deeper into BlenderCAM as it can produce some incredible results. The UI on Blender is a bit of a nightmare though and the learning curve is significant so for the moment I am sticking to 2.5D designs.