Hey guys
I'll start off by introducing myself, my name is Kevin, I am from South Africa and currently in my final year of studying Mechatronic Engineering. The CNC scene first caught my eye back when I was nearing the end of my high-school career and I've been hooked ever since.
I'm probably going to go into a bit of unnecessary detail for this next bit, however my intention for doing so is to give everyone a bit of insight with regards to the long journey that I have traveled since I started this project as well as the difficulties I overcame and lessons learned along the way which will hopefully help and inspire others to pursue their their dreams - no matter how long it takes!
Anyways, at the age of 18 I decided to pursue the ambitious task of building my own CNC router. Not knowing exactly where to start, I began by drawing up various designs on Sketchup. I hadn't settled on a specific design at the time however I had a basic idea of what I wanted. I decided that although my design can change, one element of the machine which would not change is the electronics required for it to work. Moving forward I set myself the goal of buying the electronics of the machine first (first mistake). I got a job during the school holidays and managed to purchase and import a decent kit from the US. Now for those of you who don't know, importing pretty much anything into South Africa costs an absolute arm and a leg, however I assured myself that the biggest expense is out the way (oh how wrong I was...).
Fast forward 5(!) years later. During this time I sort of got sidetracked... I wouldn't say that I had lost interest but a number of factors kept me from continuing. University for starters kept me incredibly busy. Part-time work was out of the question and I also realized that I had *severely* underestimated the money I needed to finish this project. Sourcing parts such as linear bearings, rails, ACME threaded roads, couplings and such was a massive issue as well. I almost begin to drool when I browse sites like McMaster-Carr because I can only dream of having a hardware store like that in my country! It was only when 3D printing starting becoming a trend locally that parts became slightly easier to source. Right, now let's get down to business...
These are the requirements and expectations that I set for the finished machine:
- STIFFNESS! I lurked these forums for ages gathering all the knowledge I could and one topic which kept coming up was overall structure stiffness and rigidity. I came so close to settling on an MDF-based design but at the last minute I stumbled across a local supplier that sells those fancy 8020 aluminium extrusions. Obviously aluminium is far more expensive to build with but I decided to bite the bullet and use it as the main structure material mainly for future-proofing if I eventually want to mill soft metals.
- Moderate working area. To be honest I initially wanted a working area of 1000 mm x 1000 mm. Well, I soon came to my senses and decided something along the lines of 700 mm x 500 mm would be more than enough for me. As for z-axis travel, about 100 mm sounded good.
- Accuracy. I'm not looking for insane tolerances, 0.1 mm would be great.
- Longevity. I want this machine to have a long service life.
- Aesthetic appeal. I know I know... Aesthetics don't exactly affect the performance of the machine, but I wanted the end result to look professional :)
Following these requirements and expectations, I came up with the final design:
I have updates already lined up which I will progressively release, I just want to get as much constructive criticism from each update since that is the only way that I will learn how to improve my design if I decide to build another machine in the future.
Stay tuned!