For a blog I started about our CNC router, I've been a bit minimal on the details. It's about time that changed.
Argus (business partner is probably best description) and I finished the physical construction some time in early 2011 and have spent the following 12 months bending it to our will.
It was purchased as a kit from the US. The kit included the electronics, all the pieces for the gantry, chains, gears, bolts and some rather difficult to follow video instructions. Still, it saved us quite a bit of screwing around and you can get the kits at buildyourcnc. The table it all sits on we constructed ourselves and I'll cover that in more detail in the future.
This is a 3 axis machine. The X and Y axis are running on chains, while the Z axis uses a lead-screw.
The whole unit is quite large, about 1500mm by 3000mm (About 5' by 10'). If I had to do it all over again I'd go something smaller, simply to make it easier to work around.
At the moment we're using a Makita 900 router. It's probably a little small for this job and we'll be upgrading it "soon" (been saying that for about 4 months). There's a 100mm (4") hose for the dust extractor hanging off the gantry that actually does a pretty good job at collecting the dust. It's hooked up to a 1HP dust extractor unit that seems to make the most noise in the whole arrangement.
At the moment we're restricted to cutting at 3mm depths. This doesn't give us the best cut, but it does reduce the noise an amazing amount. Cutting at 6mm makes an amazingly annoying high pitched whine and we've yet to identify exactly why.
The control machine is a Pentium 4 running LinuxCNC. LinuxCNC is open source control software that uses a real time kernel and it controls our machine through the parallel port. We set the rotational speed of the spindle using a SuperPID controller. At the moment this is done manually, but we could wire it into LinuxCNC for more precise control.
