Hello All,

I just joined this site and this is my first post. I am in need of a CNC router to cut out thin aluminum sheet as well as machine .75" thick MDF or Hardwood. I am building a Homebuilt plane and need to cut out all my thin aluminum sheet to make ribs for the wings. The material is 2024-T3 and thicknesses range from .016" to .062" thick. I also need to ability to cut the MDF to make the wood forms to pound the wing ribs around. I may also end up offering pre cut blanks for other builders as well.

I have over 20 years as a mechanical designer in linear motion systems but mostly on the high end building machines for the semi conductor industry and government lab research. There budget is much higher then mine..LOL I have sense left that industry and now work in the film industry designing the robotic platforms needed to adapt movie cameras to film 3D movies. Basically small self contained robotic systems to position cameras very accurately. I have the skills to build my own machine but the plane itself is also a large undertaking in itself so I am open to just buying a machine. I need a 4' x 5' working envelope. I found the CNCMogul Machne and it looks promising but it looks as though its not rigid enough for my MDF requirement. Does anyone have any experience with this machine?

If I were to build my own, I have a fair amount of linear motion equipment already that I can use and cobble something together. I have recirculating rails and leadscrews long enough for the Y axis as well as the Z, but for the long X axis I would probably go with the makerslide idea or bishop wisecarver stuff running on a rack gear or a large diameter ballscrew. For the mechanics I am fine and can throw a design together quickly in solidworks, but I have many questions on the elctronics.

For the electronics, are there hobby priced drivers and amps that work with a windows based computer that have linear encoder inputs? I have some Renishaw RGH24 encoder heads and would like to incorporate them and run closed loop. I have both Sin/Cos heads and interpolated fixed resolution with Quadrature output. If anyone has a link to a windows based controller package that can have the encoder inputs and optical limits then I would lean toward just making my own machine. I am open to stepper or servo. However I already have a bunch of nema 23 & 34 steppers as well as a few even larger.

Best regards,

Marc