Background info
Father/Son team, we would be consider woodworking enthusiasts who have taken on some large custom projects for friends and family who understand that quality custom projects can't be done for the prices you find at Leon's. Some projects include custom wood furniture, entertainment centers, full kitchen renos and a spiral oak staircase.
There is no end goal of starting up a paying shop once the CNC is working, it's just another tool to improve our shops capabilities and advance the hobby. And if work comes along to help recoup some of the costs, bonus. As soon as you need it to make money, it becomes a job, which then it isn't fun anymore, right?
The old guys' been working with large CNC routers for many years in the Aerospace industry, cutting aluminum parts out of sheets for wings and fuselages. He has built up tooling over the years for a small machine shop and a decent wood shop.
The young guy, has a background in Mechanical engineering and design projects. Has a new house and lots of complex projects that would become so much easier with a new CNC machine.
We started researching DIY CNC machines a few years ago and trying to figure out:
A- What was a "must" and what was a "want"
B- What we could realistically afford on our budget
C- What we think our future uses would be and making sure that we tried to incorporate those capabilities into the machine up front.
Things that were a "MUST"
- 3 Axis Servo Motors (wanted closed loop for accuracy)
- 3 Ballscrews, don't want to deal with dual motor X axis.
- 4x8 cutting area
I'll be trying to keep the posts short and the photos of our progress plenty.
I have a separate thread which was basically the electronics portion of the project.
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/diy-cn...lp_advice.html
This will be the mechanical side of it and final assembly.
Here are a few pictures of the initial design concept. Not everything is set in stone. There has been a lot of reverse engineering required as I will explain in future posts.
Initial Concept was based on numerous builds we had read about, namely MadVac's design.
MadVac CNC - home made 4'x8' cnc precision gantry router