As I announced long time ago I will start my CNC-Mill-building series today. The machine is already finished by now, but I think it's more interesting to show you the complete process, from design to the working Machine.
My main goal was to be able to manufacture parts out of at least 10 mm aluminium with reasonable accuracy and nice surface finish. First I started redesigning my old portal mill. I ended up with a nearly complete rework of the old design. The machine is looking similar but has a lot of new features, is much more rigid and uses a Kress FME 800 spindle instead of my weak Proxxon hand grinder.
My main goal was to be able to manufacture parts out of at least 10 mm aluminium with reasonable accuracy and nice surface finish. First I started redesigning my old portal mill. I ended up with a nearly complete rework of the old design. The machine is looking similar but has a lot of new features, is much more rigid and uses a Kress FME 800 spindle instead of my weak Proxxon hand grinder.
Because I don't like half finished stuff and I'm crazy I made manufacturing drawings, assembly drawings and part lists for the whole machine including all standard parts like screws, washers and so on. I will probably upload them on a GitHub repository sometime in the future.
Beside the boring CAD work I also tried out the cable and harness feature of Inventor. Of course I lost the ability to easily move all the axis in CAD but it is looking really cool in 3D. I was also able to create drawings of all the different cables with dimensions. No measuring and estimations anymore!
As I already finished the machine at this time I have to say the Z-axis is not designed properly. I thought the rails are rigid enough because of their shortness. Never use unsupported rails on machines like this. Additionally, my anti backlash nut is sufficient for plastic and wood milling but not for aluminium.
The schematic is designed in Visio with hand made icons of this nice mate-n-lock connectors. I love those because I will be able to exchange the motors very easily when I need better, faster or stronger ones. Also they are really small and lock. So no danger of disconnected motors while working. As you may have seen in my older posts, I will use a TB6560 board from china and Mach3 to drive my machine. I haven't done a schematic for this part of the machine. You may have also noticed that I didn't connect the limit switches in series which would have been possible with Mach3. My idea was to make a universal connector over my 25 pin parallel port connector and do all the other stuff on the controller side. This gives me the control over every single limit switch if I need it.