Search:

I have never heard anyone complain about the quality of the Taig spindles. The power, well, I can see some desire for more powerful but the limitation of the tooling size by the collet makes that...

Having it work on the Roland would just be a bonus. We bought our licence for MeshCam Art that I got through Probotix when we bought our Fireball Comet. So far I am just playing with Meshcam, since...

I noticed the Roland output as a choice on the path generation. We have an old Roland PNC-2500 CAMM3 at work and the software that comes with it is pretty limited. Anyone know the models of Roland...

Depends on where you are. I just go over to a place here in town that carries structural steel for building. Also places that work on trailers, and places that do duct work. The biggest expense in...

Steel doesn't have to be heavy. It can be quite light and strong. Look at bicycle frames. They routinely build them out of carbon fiber, steel, aluminum, and titanium. They are also building some out...

If you are committed to the 80/20, going up to the 80mm x 80mm would be a really good place to spend the money. You can get the 100mm square tube for about the same price at online metals as the...

I have not been making any progress on mine either. Not in any big hurry myself. Lots of projects and little spare time.

The system from Fine Line Automation seems fine for general purpose. I...

leaveme:

I think for a small machine, one of the best combinations I could think of would be one of the 12V Proxxon spindles with a PWM controller. I already have one of the 120V ones and it is...

From what I read, the SuperPID is an awesome product and well worth the money. Putting a $150 controller on a $20 laminate trimmer seems a bit overkill though.

If you are going to spend any real...

Motor control is the complicated part of CNC.

This is the cheap version of a controller for a brushed motor. Not elegant but it will slow it down.

Router Speed Control

It would work but be aware that these are noisy and the collet doesn't always hold that well (in my experience, I have 2 of them)

You will probably want to slow it down with a speed controller for...

Just reading the specs on the new Motherboard 2.4, it just provides step and direction to the drivers so you could put pretty much whatever stepper drivers you wanted.

I think it is pretty nice...

Not to dissuade you from tinkering, but that sounds like a motor that only Rube Goldberg could appreciate. Electronic control of motors is a much more normal approach. Many of the RC groups have a...

You can't just attach an RPM speed to a material such as 10,000 rpm for aluminum. You have to use the linear cutting speed for the material and then look at the diameter of the bit (or the workpiece...

A lot of the newer things are coming with brushless motors now and they have a lot to be said for them. They are *generally* more efficient and longer lasting than brushed motors. You do pay by...

It depends on what you want to play with and your goals. The USB and parallel port ideas are not really mutually exclusive if you want to play with the programming and hardware. I have stuff for...

They look like this one from Amazon. There are cheaper places - I ordered my stuff from Hobby King out of Hong Kong.

I already have some Arduinos so I didn't buy one of the testers. I just don't...

You can either:

Use some other controller (Like an arduino) to provide the PWM to the electronic speed controller. More expensive but more options for controlling things.

You can use one of the...

No, its not that I don't trust calculations, quite the opposite actually. I just have seen a lot of glossy sales brochures that are, shall we say, overly optimistic.

The whole selling more...

Yes, those are gorgeous machines but I really don't have that much faith in engineering data that goes that far beyond what is usable. It is pretty much salesmanship on their part. The machines may...

Bracing is always better but at the upper end of this range, 2mm steel is 14 gauge steel. This is thicker than most of the structural members that they use for the beams in steel buildings. They have...

There will be plenty of mass just with the required structure. For the most part, adding mass only changes the frequency of the vibrations. You stop vibrations by not moving.

My own personal...

I also like the new Makerbot 2.4 motherboard. SD card, outputs for 5 steppers, limit switches broken out, AT power supply connector, plus 20 digital pins brought out to a connector. Pricey at $85...

Mass on the stuff that doesn't move is your friend.
Mass on the gantry is your enemy.

If you are going to be cutting metal, you want a solid and distributed support. Each time the cutter comes...

No idea about stuff in Europe. I am down in the southernmost part of Texas in the US.

If your goal is to cut metal as well, you might as well think about doing steel structure instead of...

You can achieve some pretty good precision just with a fine scribe, files, and punches. It has worked for hundreds of years. With experience building guitars, you have more than sufficient skills to...

What you might consider if you want something a "bit off schedule " is to take one of the basic g-code interpreters and add in a couple "extra commands" that you can put it into some immediate mode...

Since nobody else has chimed in...

I am not an expert and since you are asking for advise, you probably are not either unless you are just playing stump the audience. :)

If you are playing...

I keep reading people explaining that you can't control motion over USB well enough for it to be usable. Of course I really can't figure out why the people doing it seem to not understand that it's...

Love the machine. What kind of power are you using to drive the axis?