Homemade Cnc?

[RGman]

Well i was looking at CNC on wiki, trying to understand its workings to a greater extent and i stumbled across a tutorial for making a small CNC.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/29/how-to-...machine-part-1/

http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/04/how-to-...machine-part-2/

http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/11/how-to-...machine-part-3/

I havn't yet studied the tutorial, my eyes can barely stay open.

From the looks of the final product pictures it may be a suitable machine for inlay work.

Personally, i am electronically retarded and at the moment i could not build a machine like that until i learn a bit more about electronics.

I'm sure one of you guys could build one in no time, what do you think? worth building for inlay work? If so i may have a crack at building one in the distant future.

RGMAN

[GuitarGuy]

Judging by the pictures. (ive seen this tut before) its not that accurate. You may be able to get a resolution of about 10 thou. Not accurate at all and will have a noticable gap or the inlays won't fit.

I'm looking into building somthing with a resolution of approximately .002 , Well thats the target anyway. To keep any kind of accuracy you will need linear slides on every axis and ball screws for the feed. Talkin big $.

Controller/motors(with enough power, printer motors won't cut it) $450

Linear slides off of ebay about $400 for 3 axis.

Rolled ballscrews $300

Materials and other odds and ends $300

Not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Sure you can build a cnc for under $500 but it will not be that accurate. A little too inacurate for guitar building. (usable for cutting rough shapes like balsa airplane parts)

[Mattia]

Besides, then you've got the parts. You still need to shell out for CAD/CAM software....

[GuitarGuy]

Lotsa decent free stuff out there. Not any one program but using all of them as a whole will work well.

[RGman]

I knew that the accuracy would be fairly shitty on the little CNC, most parts i can get for free (my gf's dad works at a CNC laser/router place that is shutting down at the end of Decemeber, most of the older spares will be chucked out if noone claims them so i plan to attempt to get some decent parts that way) Also alot of software i could use aswell

From there i will look at purchasing some plans from one of the many DIY CNC sites.

Anyway, i will find out whether i could get these parts then go from their, if not i will just buy the parts!

rgman

[MartyM]

I've built two cnc machines now. The first one was from John Kleinbauer's website. This showed me the basics and I then designed and built my own. John is an advocate of roller skate bearings and I used this along with drill rod, aluminum, and HDPE plastic. I have a great time making router templates and using the machine to do repetitious routing directly on the body. I recently purchased software that converts a jpeg or bmp file to Gcode ( the machine language). I am no electronics wizard, so I purchased a turn key set of motors and controller along with its software from Maxnc. The CNC has allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have attempted otherwise. I'm sure down the road 10 years they will be a pretty common tool in most home shops.