Search:

The authorities are well aware of Mr. Harlow. I reported him to them when I kept having promises broken. In the other thread about this very subject which was shut down by a CNC Zone moderator, I...

Hi Alex:

I got my slides from Ebay. The long ones for X were a challenge. Out of desperation I contacted the guy selling the most linear slides and asked if he had any 72 inch ones. He did. I...

Wow, I thought it was only Americans that had such a backward Us/Them point of view. We all live on the same planet, there is no Them. So how much wealth do you think the Chinese are accumulating...

I started designing my machine in March. It should start making money in December.

I waited four months for the Harlow table. It took almost exactly four moths to design and build this machine knowing nothing about what I was doing when I started. I took three weeks off when I got...

Hi Mark:

Please do a search on CNC Zone for "Board Mill". I wrote a blog about the construction of this machine and called it that. All your questions can be answered in great depth there.
...

Here is a photo of the new mill I told you about. In this picture the Porter Cable router spindle is fitted. I am currently working on the X2 vertical head attachment. The plate which is located on...

On a happier note:

I started designing and building a CNC machine of my own as soon as I got my refund from Dewayne in May. I finished it yesterday and made the first trial cuts. It has 60 inches...

And also to his customers.

The reason the pool of skilled labor has dried up in my opinion is because the shop owners are too greedy to train anybody. They want skilled people, but they want someone else to pay for their...

I have a friend working in the Cincinnati GE plant who gets $40, but he is a very experienced machinist not an operator. Good programmers here on the West coast make as much as $150k annually.

nine16: thank you very much.

r.r.mccoy: Thank you, yes the additional travel will be good. I could have used twice as much but did not have the room.

Barry Young

Thank you Walter.

Actually I am going to use one very heavy duty precision ground ball screw under the table. It will be very near the center rail. I can very easily move the table with one hand....

I fixed the link above. Here it is again. Thanks for letting me know.

This is what a minimill with 62 inches of X travel looks like.

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41944
...

I have been designing and building my own machine since the middle of June after I received my refund from DeWayne on May 31. The machine should be functional by the end of August or at least by mid...

Cool. I'm in, where is it? Um, is it OK if I don't smoke crack though?

This is a very ambitious project indeed. Mine is daunting and is much more conservative.

Barry Young

The table is now in place. It is a 114 pound 1/2 X 12 X 67 inch length of hot rolled steel. I lifted one end up onto my B.S.ing stool, then maneuvered the other end onto the bench. Transferring the...

Try paying a reasonable wage then. As a skilled machinist with many years experience who makes twice what your top of scale is, I can say that your problem is not a small pool of skilled people, it...

With the Master Y rail in place, the next step was to align the primary Slave Y rail. This required a piece of material long enough to space the rails while putting in the attach screws for the rail....

Thank you Phil I hope it helps someone. If others don't have to figure out some of the methods, this will be worth the documentation effort.

I started this morning by tipping the machine up into its correct position. Most of the work on X and Z is complete so I no longer need the machine lying on its back. See PHOTO 1.

I had ordered a...

Geez, and I thought my solution was genius, ok, few ideas are truly new. people have probably been doing that since the invention of the lathe huh?

Yes, the machine is for machining wooden boards...

The X axis ball screw was costly enough to make me cuss. No way could I afford $2500 for a proper precision ground ball screw. A screw this long has never shown up on Ebay in the months that I have...

Thank you very much, I will keep at it then.

Barry Young

I ended up snagging two precision ground ball screws that were a bit too long on Ebay. They both came with end mounts. I paid too much by using buy it now, but at this point I wanted the machine done...

Because the trucks for X and Z overlapped on opposite sides of the X axis carriage (the Z axis carriage has the rails attached to it rather than the trucks), very careful layout was required to...

As soon as both X rails were in, I slid the trucks on. What a feeling, it did not matter how hard I pushed them into the rail, they still slid easily. What a great product.

A magnetic base...

Hi John:

I am fairly certain that anything this large would be a problem to get into a heat treat oven. This is because right now all the airplane manufacturers are up to their ears in orders....

I decided to make the lower X rail the Master rail. From this one rail everything else was aligned. I carefully drilled and tapped the 36 holes using the rail itself as a drill jig. To get the...

The frame was hauled inside the shop and set on the workbench as in photo 1. It was decidedly ugly so it received a paint job and looked a little better in photo 2.

It was at this point that I...