[bigvinney]

I finally finished converting my grizzly G3102 vertical mill this last weekend. It took me about 1 week to design and build the conversion once I had all the parts. This is my first milling machine and I have never touched a mill before, so this is all new to me. I manually milled all of the mounting brackets from aluminum plate that was precut to the approximate dimensions. I am using 2 640oz steppers and 1 1200oz stepper powered with 3 gecko 202's controlled with mach3. All I have to do now is to get some wire covers. So far everything works great and I have engraved my company logo onto some scrap metal to practice with feeds and speeds, but I am hooked now and cant wait to mill more complex parts.

[wisp]

awsome Vinny, very nice job. How is the fit and finish of that grizz model mill?

[tobyaxis]

Very nice!! It looks strong and clean. I like the Z Axis arrangememt on the Knee.

Good Luck with it.

[bigvinney]

The fit and finish is pretty good and probably as good as it is going to get with a $2000 mill. I have never owned or used a mill before so I really have nothing to compare it to in terms of quality. To give you an idea the backlash I have is .002 on the X and Y and about .005 on the Z but the backlash compensation in mach 3 fixes that.

[FPV_GTp]

hi

bigvinney very nice job indeed , i see you running mach3 .

what motherboard are you using to control the gecko stepper motor drivers ?

where did you purchase the stepper motors from ? power supplies ? and so on

I'm about to start a Pacific U2 universal mill conversion also

cheers


PS ; HAve lots of fun with the mill and good job u have done

[bigvinney]

I just bought a $350 dell special for the computer. It is running a celeron processor but I have no idea what motherboard is in it. I got the steppers, drivers from www.homeshopcnc.com. He also got me hooked up with all of the supplies needed to make the power supply but I cant remeber where the parts actually came from. The 5v powersupply and breakout board is from www.cnc4pc.com. I would personally recommend both of these shops to anyone, they are both willing to give lots of help with any problems that you may have.

Hope this helps, Vince

[bigvinney]

here is the first part I have ever cnc machined. This is the logo for the company I just started. It was done on some 6061 aluminum scrap.

I have not deburred or done anything to it, this is how it came off the table when I was done. I dont have coolant yet so I was spraying wd40 overit when I was milling it out to clear the chips off the part. I used a 3/16 carbide engraving tool. The depth is .010 and the feed was at 20ipm. Also the motor was set to 2860 rpm.

[phantomcow2]

Wow, that looks excellent! Good job. DId you use ballscrew for the axes, or just keep the original?

[bigvinney]

No I kept the stock leadscrews. I dont have enough money to convert the whole thing to ballscrews yet, but maybe later.

[turbostang]

Hey Vinney - I found this thread through a quick search and wondered how the mill is holding up now days. I keep thinking I want a small mill, but for a few hundred more bucks I can get something that I hopefully won't outgrow.

How is the accuracy holding up? I'd probably switch to a ballscrew conversion pretty quickly no matter what though....

[sigraph]

I'm very interested in this setup - how is the mill holding up, mainly the stock leadscrews? I know this thread is an old one, but i'd like to get an update on how this machine functioned after you started using it for your business.

[paulduffey]

Hey Vinny, I just bought one of these and I know this post was originally posted 10 years ago. Are there any better/cheaper sources for the components or are there any problems you ran into since you set this up? or things you wished you'd done different? etc? Or any tips?