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Thanks Mark. Unfortunately I didn't start off scraping the bottom of the mill - I thought it was sitting flat on the stand I made, but either I was wrong or something shifted / warped / relaxed...

More test fixtures and scraping setups. I need to get a bigger surface plate if I want to scrape in the top of the table and possibly the face of the column (I could probably do the column without...

Here's the 5 year update on my mill project. The take away is 'life gets in the way'. But over the last 5 years, I learned (kind of) how to hand scrape, built a lot of scraping and measuring tools...

A toaster oven isn't going to do anything - that's what you would use to temper it after hardening to a fairly high hardness. A2 hardening is preheat up to ~800C, hold 15min, then 925-980C, hold 30...

Yes, I was thinking of a zig zag pattern.

I got the mill mounted on the stand and leveled, wired it up, and made some test cuts. I modified a steel block for a new quick change tool post on my lathe and then did some drilling and tapping on...

I built a stand for the mill over the last two weeks. It's 3" square tubing, 3/16" wall thickness with a 1/8" plate shelf and a 1/2" plate top which seems to be fairly flat after I finished welding...

I got tired of not having a mill and perpetual planning to make a mill, so I caved and just bought a bench top mill, a Precision Matthews PM-30. This is a ~500lb bench top mill with an R8 spindle,...

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

I won't say I've been working on this project again, but I have been thinking about it off and on. I still have basically the same set of problems I'm trying to...

You mean the c axis (rotation about Z)? The machines on the website you reference don't have that alignment, so I'd assume their software would work with an offset there as well as others. When I...

That's really cool - thanks for posting. You could look at 'Precision Machine Design' by Slocum for more ideas on stuff like that. He talks about air bearings and a lot of other concepts that lathe...

Backlash. Standard gearboxes like that will have some. You want a minimal amount, as low as you can get. Think about having a long tool and long spindle on the end of your head. Any angular...

If you don't have current set resistors, you have it set to max - 7A. There's a legend right on top of the driver for resistor size vs current settting. If your motors don't need that much current,...

Btw, do you have current limiting resistors on your other drives? No resistor sets the limit to max, 7A, per the manual. There's also a note in there about needing heatsinks for the drives for more...

Another possibility could be a mechanical switch on an arm on your cross slide. You program it to go up and touch the side or front of the material after being pulled. If the switch doesn't close,...

Good to hear!

Assuming your gecko drives use step and direction input, your BOB sends a string of step pulses to the drive. How many pulses show up tells the drive how much (and how fast) to turn the motor. So...

See if your direction pin to that drive is changing voltage when you change directions. It sounds like the step pulses are fine, but the direction voltage isn't changing.

I think he's saying he's gaging the distance of his gantry from his home switches with a credit card, and after homing both sides to square the gantry one side is one credit card thickness from its...

My company is looking for a full time lab tech to run and maintain small CNC machinery, 3D printers, and other fabrication and test/measurement related lab equipment in a small lab (you + the lab...

I can't tell what's going from your video, but if the VFD is undesirably commanded to go to a lower speed when you're moving (or whatever the problem is), you would suspect either an issue with the...

What is your control setup for the VFD? Or did you describe that in a previous post?

You could try an AC servo motor. Like this:
Fanuc A06B 0163 B175 AC Servo Motor 1 8KW | eBay

You can't run these with a VFD - you'd have to get a servomotor drive and a power supply for the...

Looks nice!

I've been thinking about this machine a bit more. I still have lots of time before I can do anything on it besides design, but I found an interesting newer design from Mori Seiki. See:...

If you have a G540 (other controllers are probably different), you need to make sure the parallel port can supply 5mA or more of current at a voltage greater than what the G540 needs to see a signal...

I had this happen to me a few times. The stepper wouldn't move even though Mach3 was telling it to. It would (for whatever reason) happen on Z+ moves most often, so Mach3 would think the bit was...

Glad you enjoyed it. I'm hoping I can get back to working on this eventually, but with where I've moved to it's going to have to be scaled back.

A small update - I found an optical square on ebay this week. It's a Farrand type 88305, made in 1962. It's specified to be 90 degrees +/- 2", but hopefully I can calibrate it a bit more accurately...

Actually with this Z setup the stiffness of the machine does change as the Z goes up and down. A constant force applied to the tool will apply a varying load to the bearing blocks as the Z changes...