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  1. #21
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
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    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Quote Originally Posted by peteeng View Post
    Hi BT - They may be designed for setting or grouting a rail but floating it 1/4" above the steel? What is the epoxy spec can you link to supplier? Cheers Peter
    I not sure what the the rules are yet for adding product links, etc. But go to precisionepoxy dot com under product list under the "Leveling Epoxies" - SC-15P. I did a ton of research on this and there are numerous successful machine builds (not just routers) using this technic so I felt pretty good this would be a good solution. I wasn't able to use this exact product but a very, very similar product due to timing. Oh and this stuff is hard as a rock!

  2. #22
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
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    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    One additional piece of information that I learned, many machine tool re-builders use this stuff as well.

  3. #23
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Yet more fabricating work for the fail safe stops, limit and homing proximity switch brackets. It's the little stuff that chews up time!

  4. #24
    Join Date
    Dec 2003
    Posts
    1206

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    It may be a different epoxy mix,but a good number of boatbuilders over here use this stuff for shimming things like engine feet or deck crane bases. Chockfast Orange | UK Marine Resins (Incorporating EIP) .Obviously there are several similar products for supporting crane or train tracks.For my part,I would want to be sure they had fully cured before doing any work over them.

  5. #25
    Join Date
    Jul 2018
    Posts
    6254

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Hi BT - So you did a tonne of research settled on a product then used something different? then didn't tell us what you used? Most epoxies in this application are medium weight pure epoxies. Nothing really special about them. Some have additives to improve hardness such as ceramic fillers (sand, quartz etc). The chockfast orange in its SDS does not mention fillers yet it mentions its self extinguishing. This means it has ATH added maybe (aluminium trihydride). But not much as it won't pour if a lot is added. 40 barcol is pretty much standard for laminating resins (epoxy, vinyl esters and polyesters) Precision Epoxy don't publish their TDS or SDS so can't comment on their epoxies but their pours are impressive. I've been looking at making surface plates using epoxy but have not been able to find out how accurate they are compared to granite or if they are poured and stilled scraped & polished. The trick with thick pours is to get the hardener right. Too active means too fast and the surface crawls as you get hot spots. Too inactive and the epoxy won't go off!! It looses too much heat to its surroundings so just sits there and goes mushy... Cheers Peter

  6. #26
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Posts
    3920

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Wow! I’m not even pass the first page and I have to say nice work, this is a beautiful build so far! By the way your welds look awesome, professional?

    As for the epoxy leveling could you add details such as the brand? I’m pretty sure this threads will soon become a howto example.

  7. #27
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Quote Originally Posted by peteeng View Post
    Hi BT - So you did a tonne of research settled on a product then used something different? then didn't tell us what you used? Most epoxies in this application are medium weight pure epoxies. Nothing really special about them. Some have additives to improve hardness such as ceramic fillers (sand, quartz etc). The chockfast orange in its SDS does not mention fillers yet it mentions its self extinguishing. This means it has ATH added maybe (aluminium trihydride). But not much as it won't pour if a lot is added. 40 barcol is pretty much standard for laminating resins (epoxy, vinyl esters and polyesters) Precision Epoxy don't publish their TDS or SDS so can't comment on their epoxies but their pours are impressive. I've been looking at making surface plates using epoxy but have not been able to find out how accurate they are compared to granite or if they are poured and stilled scraped & polished. The trick with thick pours is to get the hardener right. Too active means too fast and the surface crawls as you get hot spots. Too inactive and the epoxy won't go off!! It looses too much heat to its surroundings so just sits there and goes mushy... Cheers Peter
    Pete, I wasn't trying to avoid not telling you what product I used at all. I in fact talked to to folks at Precision and as luck would have it for me, they where heading out to a big 4 week job at an automobile plant and would be 6+ weeks before I could even get their product, that's were the timing comes in for me, I just did not want to delay what would have amounted to 2 months or better of a delay.. I ask about using the "West Systems" epoxy and he gave me some pointers. Yes they have some very impressive pours and yep as you stated there's not to much special about epoxy per say, you can add fillers etc, but tends to hurt the viscosity as you noted. What I learned and as you indicated as well, it's really about the hardener you choose for the environment and how thick your pour is going to be.

    I used the West Systems 105 and the slowest hardener they have 209 (which by the by the 209 hardener is a little harder to come by). I poured this in the mid spring here and I would not have wanted anything faster for a hardener. I actually let it setup for 3 weeks but as the days went by I would cut a small section out of the cross sections just to see how it was curing. By the end, if I wanted to take a chisel and hammer (how I was doing it in the beginning) I could no longer get a clean piece off the metal cross bars and I had to use a 25 grit belt sander to get the remaining epoxy off the cross sections. Here's a link to the physical properties and safety data sheets: https://www.westsystem.com/products/...al-properties/

    Hope this helps.

    Kim

  8. #28
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Quote Originally Posted by wizard View Post
    Wow! I’m not even pass the first page and I have to say nice work, this is a beautiful build so far! By the way your welds look awesome, professional?

    As for the epoxy leveling could you add details such as the brand? I’m pretty sure this threads will soon become a howto example.
    Hi Wizard, Yep I put the product details above to Pete's inquiry. Thank you, but no, not a professional welder, but I will confess I learned how to what was called in the early days HeliArc welding (Same thing as what we call TIG today) when I was about 13-14 years old thanks to my Dad. At the time he was a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy and stationed on a submarine tender (A floating repair shop for submarines). Weekends were he had "weekend duty", I was allowed to go with him. I spent the better part of my time in the machine and welding shops on the ship. There they taught me how to HeliArc weld, cut and inspect your welds, the whole 9 yards. From there it has always grew on me and I have 3 welders now :faceplam:, but my early career was in fact a machinist.

  9. #29
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Now beginning to start the process of threading all oil lines, wiring and coolant lines, etc. In the beginning it looks like a mess but, I figured I may as well show you the messy parts as well as in the end it comes together. Note all the wiring and oil lines have some outer shielding to protect from sharper bends and where I thought vibration could cause a rubbing issue. Also there is very, very little external exposure of these as I have most of the oil lines and wiring running through the internals of the machine as you can see.

    Boy was I getting excited as I thought I was seeing light at the end of the tunnel... little did I know just how much work it was going to be to complete wiring job. My controller box is under the table which makes for tighter working quarters but I didn't want to take any more shop floor space

  10. #30
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    I want my controller box were all my high voltage mostly AC on one side of the box and separated by some kind of wall and all my lower DC voltage on the other side. I've read where others have had odd electrical noise issues and since I had been around CNC machines in my early years and knowing how the commercial manufactures try and do separation in the controller boxes, I would follow that principle. I laid out all my components on some plywood about the size I knew I could fit a box under the table. For this sheet metal box, I found a local shop and they cut and just did the bending for me and I did all the welding. So for the center panel, I made this a double wall so I didn't have to worry about screws and stuff poking through the other side interfering with something else. I save a lot of packing material as I find at some point in time I can recycle/re-purpose it. I had a nice piece of 3/4" thick Styrofoam sheet that I used as a spacer and insulator in between the 2 panels. Once I had everything laid out, I transferred that onto the panels and did all the drill and tapping and I used a lot of the "self" drilling sheet metal screws were I could.

    I built a PC motherboard bracket that held the mini-ITX motherboard, a 12v mini ATX power supply and an SSD drive for a complete computer in a nice small package to put into the low voltage side of the cabinet. If your interested in knowing what components these are I'll post that as well.

    Again, I failed to take pictures of the raw metal box I may not get the rest for a few days.

  11. #31
    Join Date
    Dec 2019
    Posts
    11

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    You did an awesome job dude! Love the machine, its incredible for being built from scratch.

  12. #32
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    First, I apologize for not updating this in a more timely fashion, it's been pretty busy with real work and being out of town for 3 weeks. So in these next few updates I should have everything posted to my finished machine. I initially laid out all my components for the controller cabinet on a piece of plywood the size of my cabinet with the high side of voltage on one side and the low side on the other and planning on a single pass through on one end for the wiring that needed to cross from one side to the other. Then I drilled/tapped (mostly self drilling/tapping screws) all the holes for the components before painting the cabinet. For my monitor I am using a Planar Touch Screen monitor mounted on an articulated arm that I got for free as it was being thrown out in the scrape pile. As the saying goes, what's one mans garbage is another mans treasure I made a mounting plate for the monitor and E-Stop and Power-Up buttons control. It seemed like a mess of wires at many times but it came together nicely.

  13. #33
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Here are some additional pictures of finished controller cabinet wiring. Also you can see that I have a coolant radiator for the spindle. All the fans are 110v AC fans. Note: I initially used 2 Fotek solid state relays, don't do it! A) there are to many fake units out there from what I learned and B) apparently the "real" ones aren't that good either. One I was using for my dust collector failed within 1 or 2 days of very little usage and the other for the coolant pump failed a day after that. I ended up getting some from Automation Direct and have been working great. These photos show the Fotek's mounted but they are history now, lesson learned.

  14. #34
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Next up, I used 3/4" a cabinet grade plywood that is marine grade glued. I clamped it all down and used the router to pilot drill all the holes and finished it manually with a hand power drill. I used 1/4" tee nuts to hold down the plywood, then I surfaced the top of the plywood with a nice new insert based 3-1/4" cutter. As you can see in a couple of areas it only got down to the first layer of ply which amounted to right at .06" across the entire surface. The very back that could not be finished due to travel limit of the Y-Axis I finished off with a belt sander. Now that the surface is perfectly flat, I programmed the T-Track grooves for .015" depth to help keep the T-Track perfectly straight and parallel. I used Gorilla glue and screws to secure the T-Track. As a side note, using Gorilla glue, you must "wet" the surface lightly to activate the glue. This will cause the glue to foam up and leak out, just let it set up and later come back and use a razor blade to cut the excess away. You can see in one of the pictures of the glue leaked out. Once all the T-Track was mounted I then cut 3/4" thick MDF strips to fit between the T-Tracks and screwed down on to the plywood. I purchased the T-Track from Orange Aluminum, you can't beat there prices for T-Track. The size of it is a bit larger than other vendors but still works with 1/4" bolts.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails IMG_20191110_202045_1.jpg   IMG_20191110_202050_1.jpg   IMG_20191110_202114_1.jpg   IMG_20191127_170226_1.jpg  

    IMG_20191128_223925_1.jpg  

  15. #35
    Join Date
    Oct 2019
    Posts
    31

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    And finally we are back to the finished machine. I have a few other projects to do, like I need to make a new workbench/Assembly table now and get a little more organized. And now that I've completed the router, I'm committed to remodeling the kitchen for the wife The things I get myself into

    I've already completed one job with the machine that was more of a "charity" work for my daughters new start-up church and have already come back as a repeat customer now for additional work! It's nice to have the additional work but I'm not prepared for this yet! So I need to get busy organizing my shop, next I hope to design and build my rotary axis for the router as you may have noticed in my earlier pictures there is one additional servo drive not be used at the moment which is planned for the rotary axis.

    Thanks for all the comments, listening and watching of my build. I'll be sure to post my build for the rotary axis. If anyone has questions I am happy to help in anyway I can and I will try and respond as soon as I can.

  16. #36
    Join Date
    Jul 2018
    Posts
    6254

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Hi BT or Kim - Its really great to see such a well executed machine. Hopefully you can't keep up with the sawdust and it reaches the bench height. Your shop is a bit too clean at the moment Peter

  17. #37
    Join Date
    Feb 2019
    Posts
    24

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    One of the better diy machines I've ever seen. Congrats!

  18. #38
    Join Date
    Mar 2020
    Posts
    1

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Impressive work !! thanks for sharing.

    I am designing a slightly smaller machine (1800x1250mm) and I hesitate between a ball screw or a rack. Are you satisfied with your rack and pignon system? Was it complex to implement and tune ? I have the impression that there is no spring which allows the pinion motor plate to be pressed onto the rack?

  19. #39

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    Nice machine BT, Did you fabricate all the parts yourserf or sub it out?

    Overall very clean work across the board.

  20. #40
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Posts
    1195

    Re: Kim's - BTW 4x8 CNC Build

    What mod size of rack you use ? How do u energize gearbox on rack ?

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