Just built my own cnc

Awesome; Good work! This certainly would allow me to make my cases much more easily.

Good luck with your designs.

I'm using a standard 3 axis micro stepper driver board that I found on the internet. Seems like a very good board for this machine. I'm going to use Mach 3 with a standard pc to control it since it is free for up to 500 lines of g-code and is very cheap to upgrade to 10,000,000 lines of g-code. I am going to use meshcam to convert all of my 2d and 3d files into g-code. I use Illustrator for the 2d files and Rhino for 3d files, there is a lot of 3d software out there to choose from you could even use google sketch-up if you want to.

You can find everything you need to know to build this yourself on the internet. I did about 3 months of research and put all my other projects on hold for this one. I pretty much only needed to go to a few different forums and diy webpages to find out everything I needed to know to build this thing and get it running. After I get my first cut with this dremel I'm going to expand the Y axis (forward and back) by three feet and the X (Left to Right) axis by 10" and the Z axis (up and down) by 3 inches and reinforce the whole thing to handle a palm router. Once I had everything together I assembeled it in less than 6 hours. These pieces were cut to super tight tolerances so I had to pretty much use a rubber mallet to get every piece in place correctly. The rubber mallet was my best friend in this project.

thanks man, i just got the tracks installed on all axis. It took me a while to get the pulleys alligned with the track correctly. My controller will be here tomorrow and if my psu for this thing isn't here tomorrow then I will mod a computer psu to work with my motors and controller so I can get my first cut this weekend .

So i missed my delivery yesterday. I had only left my house for an hour to help my buddy with his BMW e30 s52 motor swap and when I came home FedEx had a nice note for me that no one was home to sign for my package I guess the controller will be delivered again on Monday. Gives me time to finish up working on my 97 VR6 though After a year of modding/rebuilding my engine I get to hopefully turn her over and hear the mighty roar of the VR6 again today :O

Very Nice! +1
More detailed pics please (build log?)

Just for acrylic or metal-work too?
and you'll start taking parts orders when?

Cheers

[Edit] Virtual +1 for the nice choice in frosty cold beverages! :

Hey thanks man apreciate it. I'll post a little build log when I have some time, I've been pretty busy lately. My controller came in the mail yesterday woop woop so I should be making my first cut soon but I got to get my car out of my garage first . Right now I'm going to be working with acrylic and wood until I get some bigger motors on this thing and I'm thinking about purchasing a 5hp spindle in the short future. I don't plan on working with any metal until I get bigger stepper motors. Well thanks for looking guys hopefully I will get a cut soon. I'll post some pics of the build tonight. Cheers

I was just going to ask that..
It looks very nice. If the cost for materials isn't over the top I may be interested in building one.

Hey guys thanks for the comments.

This project has cost me just about $675 including all materials, hardware, motors, PSU, and 3 axis controller that came with serial port cable for pc. You also need a computer with a serial port but it doesn't have to be the nicest computer since you aren't doing any modeling on it your just going to use it to control the machine. I've got spare computer parts and a monitor that I'm going to use to control this thing. You could easily scale this model up to cut much larger things, I just wanted to start with something small and easy to get the fundamentals of building a cnc. I don't know if I'm going to do a build log but I will include some detailed pics in the near future. I'm swamped this week so I won't be messing with my machine until this weekend. I'll get down with some macro pics as well

If you want info on plans and all that stuff pm me .

Here's the controller that came the other day


My favorite feature is the over sized heatsink

hey thanks