Thread: Half baked CNC mill
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11-06-2011 #1
Hi Folks
I have one of these.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=...QEwAw&dur=1757
I want to get into CNC and havent really room for another machine. Nor do I really want to modify it too much as it seems they have a "purist following " of guys who feel that any change to the original is sacrilege. I dont subscribe to that school of thought but there may come a day when I might want to sell it to one of them.
In addition the mods required to fit ball screws and keep it neat are probably beyond me
So I have another plan.
I decided I could get one of these ( dirt cheap )
http://www.axminster.co.uk/axminster...ble-prod21825/
Dirt cheap for obvious reasons , but if I plant it on the table of my FP1 and add CNC drives to the two axes then we have a neat solution.
Its cheap enough that you have no qualms about filleting it to add some equally cheap chinese ball screws
http://cgi.ebay.com/2-ballscrews-RM1...item3a56e09f37
"Simples " as the meercats say
Except it isnt quite! Why did I ever expect that?
So far I have stripped the table , thrown away virtually most of the bits, and begun fitting a ballscrew to the base.
The first problem is that nothing seems square to anything else on their machining of these castings. An evening on the marking off table brings me to that conclusion, So split a few differences, find a reasonable datum and effectively start again from scratch. As the dovetails seem to be the most significant bit I have to send a couple of evenings machining the edges and faces of the castings true to the dovetails. Not too difficult once you have decided on the process.
Now having a couple of faces which are actually square to the axis, I now have somewhere to mount the bearings for the ballscrews .
Now we start into chapter two of the saga :rofl:
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