For quite a while I have been working on a simple machine.I didn't want to commit to an "ultimate" machine without the assurance of knowing my capabilities would get me there.For both ease of construction and cost I went with a moving table machine built of MDF.Against some opinions I used high load drawer runners to permit movement but I did add a third across the X and Y axes to limit lateral movement and for my current purposes they are OK.For the Z axis I went for 12mm supported round rails and that works very well.
For moving things around I bought a Nema 23 230 oz/in kit from Long's Motor and the hardware is good.I bought ballscrews with a 5mm pitch and if I did it again I might go coarser.The painful part was getting the Longs breakout board to move the motors and I have to thank several posters on various forums and contributors to youtube for guiding me through this part of the process.
For turning the tools I already had a Rotozip that wasn't doing much and made some mounting brackets to secure it.I moved on to the control software and after a bit of looking at Arduino based systems I decided Linuxcnc was best for me.The stepconf part of things was shall we say interesting but I got the axes moving only to be mystified by the test run of +/- 15mm travelling 30mm-it seemed odd to me that a plus and then minus move of the same distance didn't result in a return to the starting point.Having worked out what they intended, I reset the number of steps/mm and all has been well.
I have tried two ways of generating toolpaths.For engraving or v-carving I have found f-engrave very good,even if I don't totally understand how to get it to v-carve in stages that don't work the Rotozip too hard-more practice needed I suspect.For other toolpaths I am finding the Path module of Freecad amazingly good and it has a built in post processor for Linuxcnc.
In conclusion I am glad to have undertaken the project and would make many of the same choices again.In fact I may well go for a bigger and better machine using some of the knowledge I have gained along the way.
My seasonal greetings to all those of you doing the same sort of thing.
Attachment 407378
From an outline turned into a toolpath by f-engrave.