Let the assembly begin

Yesterday my pre-cut aluminium profiles and 90* angle brackets arrived. I ordered these from Boikon and were delivered within a week.

Yesterday evening we immediately started with the assembly of the bridge gantry and the rest of the frame.

This morning my father welded the legs.

And we moved the everything to my attic for assembly. This is still temporarily because I need to paint the frame; all the legs and welds are still bare metal.

You gotta love SketchUp

It took me awhile to get the components in to SketchUp but this is it, the first draft of my new CNC router build from the parts salvaged from the camera dolly. With this setup the maximum reach of the mill will be 56x56 cm with a height of 12 cm. There are still somethings to figure out but these will become clear once I start building (I hope)

The next step is to order the aluminium profile and start building the gantry.

IronMan

While I was still trying to figure out how to get the v-groove wheels to work my friend called me and said he had a surprise for me. The guy that collects his old iron, let call him IronMan, had this in the front of his truck...

My friend knows that I'm building a new CNC Router and thought this would make a perfect Z-axis. He asked IronMan if you could have the (soon to become) Z-axis and IronMan said "OK, but this is on a small part of it, the rest is in the back of my truck".

It is some sort of camera dolly that comes from a local photographer who is cleaning up his place. My friend offered IronMan 50 EURO for the lot and, lucky for me, IronMan agreed :)

My dad spent the rest of the day taking the thing apart and after cleaning everything this is what was salvaged.

From left to right and from top to bottom this is:

• power PCB (12 and 24V DC)
• transformer
• 6 bearing blocks each with 4 wheels.
• 2 linear guides of 32 cm
• 1 bearing
• 3 v-groove wheel, hmmm there was a time that I needed these.
• 5 micro switches
• stepper motor driver
• 2 belts
• the maybe still to become z-axis
• DC motor h-bridge (I've 3 in total)
• steppermotor
• 2 24V DC motors with quadrature encoder
• 16mm trapezium spindle with nut.
• 2 linear guides 175 cm
• 24mm trapezium spindle with nut

Now that I have all this cool stuff I need to make a design and start building my new CNC router.

Groovy wheels baby

First I needed a decent frame, I had some aluminium profile left over from a desk and this looked like a ideal basis. After cutting the profile to size and temporarily bolding them together the frame looked like depicted in the photo below with in the middle my old CNC.

With the frame cut to size I start to look for a linear guiding system. I found a linear guiding system based on V-groove wheels. After days of google'ing trying to find good V-groove bearings in Europe I just gave up on buying the bearings. As an alternative I bought a Delrin rod and with the help of the CNC of my friend and the lathe skills of my father, we made 16 wheels that fit around a standard 22mm bearing.

Now it was time a test; I mounted a multiplex 18mm panel on my frame, bolded 4 aluminium 90 degree profiles and created a test bridge from some left over multiplex.

After days of testing this setup I still was not happy with the stability of the wheels. I tried different positions, groove depth's and pre-loads but it was not wobble-free :(

I needed something else...... 

Everybody starts small

In 2009 me, my father and a friend got the CNC virus and we decided to build one. The first one was build using parts from old printers in combination with a dremel.

Some pictures of the very early prototype:

After playing with it for a couple of times we decided it needed a update, so we ordered some new stepper motors and a controller print and also changed the mechanics.

This is the machine I have for years now and worked fine but not perfect. The biggest problem is the Z-axis, every now and then it got stuck forcing me to reset the whole machine and start again. Also its cutting area is small (20x20 cm cutting area). 

So....again it is time for an upgrade!! I'm going to use this blog as a personal build journal but feel free to post comments and ideas.