[JoelK]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

Well Steve its too late…. I have purchased the Angle Iron and I am in the process of finding the least expensive lead screws and possibly V-Rails I am looking into the cost for the Y and Z axis. I find it interesting that none of the companies that sell this equipment want to post the prices. Makes one wonder if there is a little collusion going on, since they are getting the stuff from China can it really cost that much to have it made and shipped here? I don't think so, oh well that's my 2 cents worth. If it was made in the USA then I could understand the cost.
Wish me luck ….
I am going to need it.

 

[DinoWalk]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

Wow this is an awesome build! I love how you used machine 1 to build and refine machine 2.

 

[Jim Jakosh]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

Steve. My hat is off to you!!!!!!!! What an accomplishment and without a mill or lathe to machine special parts!! That is a great design and I'm glad to see it working so well. I was very interested to see what you did for back lash. I have never heard of anti back last nuts but in CNC work with all the changes in direction, it is imperative that there is no backlash. I have a mill and metal lathe so if you ever need special parts made for this machine, drop me a PM.
I don't know much about computers and got out of tool making when CNC was just coming in but I did build a duplicator with no CNC needed. I found some 1" ground steel rod and recirculating ball bearings for the travel and it is so smooth . They would be just the trick for a CNC machine. They are very expensive, but I was able to buy them at scrap steel prices .

Very nice job. You can sure be proud of that machine and now you can make anything you can dream up!!
............Jim

 

[azsawdusty]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

I beg to disagree with the usefullness of a cnc. With my homebuilt machine, my second, a 40 inch table,I have made several blanket chests for family and friends. Each is made with panels with cnc cut figures which added a personalized touch. For my son's, I cut wolves into the panels, For my wife..hummingbirds, for my inlaws..horses,,for my daughter, unicorns.

I cut photos into maple to sell. I cut wooden clock parts.

The cnc is just a machine tool, your imagination is the most important tool.

 

[routertablehq]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

Spalm it turned out great! Looks like it took sometime to put that together and make it work properly but i bet it is totally worth.

 

[helluvawreck]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

I would love to build one but I probably never will get around to it. Congratulations on your achievement.

helluvawreck
https://woodworkingexpo.wordpress.com

 

[MichiganJim]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

Don't do it, Man. It'll consume you. It is the coolest and hardest thing I have ever built.

It still works great. I just don't know what to do with it. But I love it.
Steve

Ummmm, use it to cut parts to sell to us!

 

[SPalm]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

MJim, you have looked into my soul. Be careful of what you might find there

And all these years later, I still love it.

Steve

 

[asdfasdfasdfasdf]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

good job

 

[NikkiBarros]

A Journey

After posting my Woodworker's CNC Router in the projects section, I received several requests to show how I made it. I debated whether to post something here or just send them off via a bunch of links. I decided to show you the journey that I took over several years and ended up with the machine that was posted. So here goes.

Do you need one? No.
Should you build one? Probably not.
Have I done anything useful with it? Not really.
Is it cool? Oh yeah.



In 2004 I stumbled on an Internet advertisement marketing a book "Make your own CNC". I did not realize this was possible. It got me googling and I found a free set of plans call JGRO and a bunch of guys building them. I ordered some stepper motors and a controller board kit, and hit Home Depot. This is what resulted.



This is called a gantry style machine because of the overhead structure, as compared to a moving table type machine. It is a three axis machine, X is the long one that the gantry moves along, Y is going across the gantry, and Z is up and down. It uses roller skate bearings running on black gas pipe. These bearings were mounted in aluminum angle to form a V. The pipes were suspended with adjustable bolts at the ends. It used threaded rod for the leadscrews and homemade leadnuts made out of delrin plastic. I built it in one mammoth weekend.



I bought Mach3 (it was really Mach2 back then) as the controller software to take XYZ commands called G-code and turn them into step and direction pulses. I cobbled up an old PC and dedicated it to this purpose.



You can see the picture of what is being cut; a new router holder for the Porter Cable laminate trimmer.



Machine #1 was terrible, but I was one proud puppy. The machine flexed like crazy, it was amazing how much gas pipe will flex over a four foot unsupported span. It was incredibly slow and the leadscrew whipped like a jump rope. The backlash, or the amount of slop in reversing directions, was unacceptable.

This was quite early in the home CNC game and I could not find much on the subject, so I decided to attack each of these problems; flex, whip, speed, and backlash and come up with my own solutions. Enter the prototype for machine #2.

First attack the flex. The pipes had to be supported and some better construction techniques used. I turned the machine inside out, and supported the pipes with torsion boxes.



I used machine #1 to cut some struts for the Y torsion box.



I needed a way to keep the bearings riding on the pipe. So I came up with an adjustable plate that would press the bearings against the pipe by tightening screws captured with T-nuts to move the plate.



The assembled gantry with the Y carriage:



I added the same adjustable plate assembly to the inside of the gantry to ride on the X axis.



I mounted the gantry and the X pipes and checked for a smooth ride and that everything was parallel. A huge success. I could skim the clamped ruler to every corner of the table without an issue.



Now for some stress testing. To just add all kinds of weight I found a rather large motor and clamped it to the Y carriage, then repeated the skim testing.



It bound up. By adjusting the pressure plate on the bottom of the gantry, I was able to bring it all back to parallel and complete my testing. Yeah!



But the gantry was under a lot of pressure and the walls were bowing outwards. I would add stiffeners to the gantry walls later and pull them back vertical. The plate assembly was buckling a bit. It kind of wanted to rip itself apart, but it held. All in all, life was good.

So on to the Y carriage. I had noticed that it was falling apart with my stress testing. I needed the carriage to wrap around the Y beam and still be strong. I made several attempts at it and came up with gluing thin plywood to the sides of the structure and then using a laminate trimming bit to route out the inside, leaving a one piece skin. Strong.



And back to stress testing the new carriage. Success. Note the consistent vertical gap between the carriage and the beam. Yeah.



Now on to the Z axis. I chose to make it removable so I could play with it if needed. CNC guys love to play with their Z. I used polished steel rods with bronze bearings for the vertical rails to make the Z more compact and keep the router from cantilevering out too far. The picture is looking inside the Z from the back as it laying down. The two small blocks of wood have the bronze bearings in them, these are also attached to the face plate and the lead nut. So they go up and down.



I need to point out here what I did for leadscrews. Three problems need to be addressed; speed of the machine, the whip of the screw, and backlash. Backlash is a bad thing that occurs when you reverse the direction of the motors, which happens a lot. The leadnut must not have any slop in it or bind. I solved this by buying, you guessed it, anti-backlash nuts. They show up in several of these pictures. It is a plastic nut with a flange for mounting. They have slots cut in them, a spring, and a collar that form a very tight nut with just the right resistance.

To get the speed of the machine up, and the whip down, I went with fewer turns per inch on the leadscrews. Fewer rpms for the screws mean less whipping while kicking up the machine speed. This is a little harder than it sounds. These are ACME double start screws, which actually have two sets of threads. They are 8 tpi, but since the are two start, for every 4 turns of the screw the leadnut moves one inch. Why not just buy 4 tpi screws? Cause they don't make them. Since you want about 6 to 8 threads for a nut to grab on to it would make the nut really long and unstable.

The next problem for the leadscrews in the hobby arena back then was mounting them and attaching them to the motors. What you want to do is 'fix' them to the frame of the router. A screw can spin upwards of 5 times faster without whipping if it is 'fixed' instead of just spinning in a bearing. The big boys have all kinds of tricks they do with turning down the ends of the screws, but I don't have a metal lathe. So I mimicked their set up and came up with a method of using two bearings pressed into recesses either side of a plate that is firmly attached to the frame. Next on each side is a spacer and then locking collars. Then come Love-Joy motor couplers that have a piece of hard rubber in the center to allow a slight misalignment to affect things. These couplers also allow a transition from 1/2" screw to 1/4" motor shaft. This is then attached to the firmly self-supported motor. This is what those motor 'towers' are all about. Whew.



So here is Machine #2. Note the stiffeners glued to the gantry walls.



She then had the job of cutting out some larger router mounts.



For her big brother.



So how did it work? Not bad, not bad at all. A pretty tight machine. There are some things that I just wasn't happy with. The gantry could rack or twist. I could hold the left side and push and pull the right side and it would move. The Y carriage could tilt backwards a little bit if I drove the router down quickly (I know, don't do that). The whole machine was held together with tension and that just seemed wrong to me. It used radial skate bearings at a 45 degree angle and that also just seemed wrong. And my version was butt ugly.

I was posting this on another blog as I built it and quite a few people were watching and helping. Actually this has become a very popular design with at least two people selling kits of pretty similar machines. They will give the plans out for free. There are users groups now. It makes a Daddy proud. Here are CAD renderings of their kits. Google these names if you want to persue. See if you can spot any similarities.

LionClaw's


JoesCNCmodel2006's


----------------
Next post, machine # 3
Steve

It is relay great. Now the question is that, can I use any wood router in this CNC machine or I need a special type of wood router?

 

[SPalm]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

 

[Dadoo]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Man, you really impress the hell out of me. Wow. I am humbled. Keep it up.

 

[woodgizmo]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

What an incredible design.

 

[GaryK]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Great project!

Looks like you are using steppers and not servos. Do you have encoders on them?

What are you using for a controller?

Gary

 

[SPalm]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Thanks guys.

Gary, they are stepper motors so there is no feedback or encoders. Servos are a bit too much for me to handle. The machine is not allowed to miss a step, and it doesn't. Those motors are really strong. I can barely hold back the gantry when it is moving. They have about 300 oz/inch of torque and 200 steps per revolution. I am micro-stepping them with 16 pulses per step. Each revolution is 1/4 inch (4 tpi), so that is 12,800 pulses per inch. I am still amazed that it all works. The controller is a kit from HobbyCNC.com.

Steve

 

[gbvinc]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Nice! With this setup, how many inches per minute is the cutter moving? (avg)

 

[Tangle]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Good heavens this is fasinating. I just wish I wasn't so old, I try to figure it all out. But I'm paying attention and learning.

 

[SPalm]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Thanks,

My rapids are set at 150 ipm, or 2.5 inches per second. This is the rate that I can move the router around when I'm not cutting anything. The cutting rate is set by the CAM software depending on what conditions are; depth of cut, type of wood, bit RPM, diameter of the bit, etc. Just like hand routing. I am pretty chicken about pushing it, but I could take it up to the rapid rate if I wanted. Doing something like a mortise at 60 ipm or 1 inch/sec is still impressive to watch, for me. I cut something like that with successive cuts, dropping the Z about 3/8 inch per pass. So the simple answer is about as fast as you would cut it by hand.

Steve

 

[gbvinc]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Thanks for the quick answer!
What is the max travel on the X/Y and Z axis?
(Can't wait to start in building mine… it has been on my list for a year now)

 

[GaryK]

Simpler, Stronger, Prettier

The next and final version.

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.



I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.



They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.



I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.


My gantry now looked like this:



I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.



The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.



I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.



I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.



And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.



It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.





And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.



To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.







Take care,
Steve

Steve,

Great website. Thanks for the link. Seriously thinking about this. A few questions.

1. Are you plugging this into your parallel port on your PC, or a USB port with a parallel adapter?
2. Does the CAM software just output g-code and then you use a different program to send the code to the controller?
3. Do you know of any software that can take a dwg or dxf file and use that to create g-code?

Too bad about no encoders. If they were being used by the controller it would allow the steppers to skip and not lose their position. I worked with servos in the automation industry and I guess I an kind of spoiled.

Gary