Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Denis and I live in Quebec, Canada. English is not my first language, so please forgive me if I make typos/grammatical errors!
In 2011 my life was suddenly turned upside down and so began my nightmares. I started to get extremely tired and at some point, I needed between 14 to 20 hours of sleep per day. I had to go on long term sick leave and at the same time I also started to have severe muscular spasm. The spasms could last for hours and all the doctors I consulted couldn’t find the cause. The problem was that it was only affecting one side of my body and that's when you start to brood, alone with dark thoughts, and very quickly it destroyed my morale; so, I totally lost interest in living.

One day, I decided to pay a visit to one of my friend who is a professional woodworker. He had just bought a CNC Router machine to increase his productivity. He didn’t mention the price he paid for, but in my mind, it was quite expensive. I watched him cutting parts and I was surprised by the precision and the beauty of the process.
From that day, I spent all my time researching and this meant I was not spending countless hours brooding, until I stumbled across a web site on DIY CNC. Being a newbie in the domain it took me months to gather all the information I needed to set the kick-off of my new project. I finally decided to construct a CNC made of MDF and I bought the plans from Brian Oltrogge from Grunblau Studio. I bought the plans for only $ 40.00 and they were of high quality and the final product allowed me to make everything I wanted, cutting wood, aluminum and engraving PCBs.

I went to numerous forums, this one being my main source of information and I was able to build my CNC without the need to post one single question. Why asking questions when all the information is already there, just a manner of doing my homework by searching all the current posts. And I insist to say how good and knowledgeable the CNC community is. I only have good words for all of you who are totally dedicated and are spending countless hours helping and answering questions on the forums. This is when my life dramatically changed again, but this time it was for the best. The subject of this post is self-explanatory because I really don’t know where I would be today without this lifeline; I could have gone into drugs, alcohols, the river… who know!
I finally got better and returned to work in November 2012. It didn’t last for long as I lost my mother and father in law, my brother and my mother had to fight two cancers and none the less the extreme fatigue came back again and all of that in just a few years. I couldn’t take more, and I was on sick leave again in November 2014 and finally retired in June 2017 without returning to the office.

My love for CNC work is once again the driver to take me away from the darkness I was in for the last 5 years! I said my first CNC because I am in the process of building a second one made of steel. I decided to build a second one because the first one was not big enough to put a full 4x8 sheet of plywood and for me this was a major show stopper. This time, I conceived the plan for the base and modified other ideas for the rest of the machine.
Enough said, now here are a few pictures of my first MDF CNC followed by the new metal one.

This is my first post, so hopefully I will do things the right way. And hopefully I will get good enough in the future to start helping others with their questions the same way you’ve been doing for years.

It looks like I can only upload 8 pictures at a time, so I will add more in the next post.