Hi All,
Started gathering the parts to build my own CNC. Most designs that I see out there have too limited Z axis travel. Some work will be in aluminum, some acrylic. I mostly need it for prototyping as I have a couple of CNC shops make my parts. The acrylic is for making wax models for investment casting. A casting house wanted $7800 for a simple sand cast mold that could be made out of wood for a clutch housing (11"x11"x3"). Since I have several projects that will need castings it is worth the time and effort to build my own CNC.
The design is a gantry type with round bar rails and linear bearing trucks sourced from VXB. I got 16mm C7 ball screws and a 1.5kW spindle ER20 collet and inverter (Huanyang) from China. The spindle is rugged enough for mold making or so advertised. I have not selected the steppers yet because I needed the weights of the moving parts but I intend to use NEMA 34 size. The frame is made from 2.5" x 1/4" wall aluminum box tube bolted (rather than welding to keep down distortion). There are only a few connection pieces that need to be made. The work area is 350mm cube.
I will start out using LINUX and the parallel port and go from there. I might eventually go to a PCI card. I have GibbsCam, AutoCAD and Solidworks.
Here is a picture of the setup:
![]()
Started gathering the parts to build my own CNC. Most designs that I see out there have too limited Z axis travel. Some work will be in aluminum, some acrylic. I mostly need it for prototyping as I have a couple of CNC shops make my parts. The acrylic is for making wax models for investment casting. A casting house wanted $7800 for a simple sand cast mold that could be made out of wood for a clutch housing (11"x11"x3"). Since I have several projects that will need castings it is worth the time and effort to build my own CNC.
The design is a gantry type with round bar rails and linear bearing trucks sourced from VXB. I got 16mm C7 ball screws and a 1.5kW spindle ER20 collet and inverter (Huanyang) from China. The spindle is rugged enough for mold making or so advertised. I have not selected the steppers yet because I needed the weights of the moving parts but I intend to use NEMA 34 size. The frame is made from 2.5" x 1/4" wall aluminum box tube bolted (rather than welding to keep down distortion). There are only a few connection pieces that need to be made. The work area is 350mm cube.
I will start out using LINUX and the parallel port and go from there. I might eventually go to a PCI card. I have GibbsCam, AutoCAD and Solidworks.
Here is a picture of the setup:
