My WIP CNC.

Hey, a cnc sub forum on a cockpit building forum, how cool :)

I am in the process of building my cnc right now, I plan to use it for all sorts of things but one thing for sure is to make some panels for my sim.

I have all the bits and pieces to finish, just need to get the time together, hopefully it's within a few weeks from being done. Most work is happening on the weekends lately.

I am using a spindle instead of a router, nice because it goes from 6-24krpm and doesnt make any noise, less then a mouse squealing, just the noise of the wood cutting. It also doesnt throw dust around because it's water cooled so no fan blowing the dust everywhere. I am running this at home and some ideas could take hours to mill out so for the sanity of the family I had to spend a bit more to get the quiet option..

Here is a pic of where I am up to. I just finished the top of the gantry, believe it or not those two beams joined together needed 140 holes measured and drilled and 90 of them to be tapped.. No surprise how it takes up some time..

Anyway, hope to make some panels, really glad to see there are other people sharing their experiences with the panel routing.

http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/atta...0&d=1279847232

That is looking really good. Congratulations.

Can you tell us something more about the electronics; drivers, steppers you are going to use ?



Regards, Wendy

Hello Wendy, yes I can :)

I ordered some 600oz steppers from homeshopcnc.com as well as 4 gecko 203v drivers. I am putting those on a pmdg breakout boad which has a parallel port interface to go directly in to the PC. Saves a bunch of wiring, I only need to wire the steppers in to the break out board and what ever else I want, e.g. emergency, limit switches, probes etc.

I am in New Zealand and with the shipping, general costs etc I decided to get the best stuff I could as if I got it wrong it costs a bomb to try it again.

I went for the 600oz steppers because of the size weight of the machine. It's about 1.9M long by 1.5M wide but once I had it assembled and turned the ballscrews with my fingers it was so easy. The ballscrews are so efficient that it hardly takes any effort to move the gantry with my fingers and my son sitting on top.

One thing I will probably also get is the additional board so I can control the spindle speed from mach3.

Right now I have bought mach3 but I am still deciding on what to do for my other software. It's a bit of a decision as I would really like to try some stuff out that can be done with vcarve pro but I only really need some 2/2.5d software for what I have planned and that's a lot cheaper.

I have a good dividing head and rotary table from my mill so I might try and put a stepper on one and add a 4th axis, I have some furniture ideas for that one :)

Thanks for the info.

Keep us posted about your progress.


Regards, Wendy