Building something between a drill press and milling machine, using lots of Chinese parts of various quality bought online. Gear program: woodgears.ca/gear BigPrint program woodgears.ca/bigprint
@@dustinlouder aren't precision and accurary a prerequisite to mass production ? I mean, we are talking about linear ball bearings! Which most dimensions are usually ground to single digit micron precision (or so I thought was an industry standard/common sense...)
This is exactly why I love this channel, building something cool without any plans and just go by trial and error. Flashback to your early videos of making all of your machines, love it!
Seasoned trial and error, honed by many decades of experience. But yeah, he lets it all hang out there - the great stuff, the okay stuff, and the warts 🙂
wow one thing I like about your videos is they dont hide mistakes along the way but rather show how to solve real problems as they arise; there is always some new trick or technique I pick up when ever I watch one of your vids. you are gifted
In theory theory and practice should be the same. In practice they are not. So there's often how you'll think it'll work and how you find out it actually works. Coming to terms with that rapidly is key. Like when Matthias assumed those linear guide bearings were all going to be accurate. They never are. Everyone gets tripped up by that.
this man is the largest library of engineering mindset. i swear, this will be important until the end of humankind. i watch his thoughts, and it's just like computer programming, where you build something and then see what's wrong and change it. this isn't a bug, it's error handling.
I know exactly the feeling of doing all your measurements right and your build right only to discover that a part you bought and assumed was done right has all kinds of imperfections! Good rescue, Matthias!
If you follow DIY CNC you'd have seen that one coming. I was sitting here with my popcorn and I wasn't disappointed with the show. It went just how I thought it would.
The fact that someone else’s (even a commercial entity) fabrication standards are not up to our hero’s, regardless of material type, no longer surprises me. The adjustable rack engagement is a slick idea.
Nice to see you _start_ the threads with the lathe, and then finish them with a die. There's too much idealism going around here on RU-vid. Everybody acts like procedure should be perfect and never choppy, when really, the only perfect procedure is the one that gets a good result. Bail out as soon as things start to go off, I say! There's always another way. As soon as I need to make threads, I'll fix myself a hand crank.
I should make a hand crank for my lathe too. I'm eyeing an ELS setup also... I did the change gears dance, and it immediately felt like I had enough of that for a lifetime.
I appreciate the explanation between the tenon jig on the table saw versus using your slot mortiser. That finally helps to illustrate why you would use one machine over the other.
Mathias, I used to be a mechanical design engineer for a cnc machine tool manufacturer. Even on high-end ball screws and linear guides, our assemblers would often leave the mounting fasteners loose until a later stage of the assembly.
There's definitely strategies to getting alignments correct with linears. So much depends on everything else. So you work it from one point out to create those relationships. I knew he was going to run into that problem with those Chinese linear bearings. No two are ever alike. I've seen so many in DIY CNC forums ranting about it. Well, I was kind of wondering if that'd been fixed. Apparently not.
But they left them loose to achieve way lesser tolerances than with these guides. I guess they had had less tolerance when lose than these after being bolted correctly.
I've been wanting to make my own mill for a while: fun to watch you tackle it. I would have thought that a counterweight system would have worked better than springs.
This is exactly why I stay subscribed to you. These videos are always the reason I end up back in my garage, cleaning off my workbench and building some cool shit for my cat like a shelf or a tower!
One benefit of the slight misalignment of these cheaper rails is that this takes out the slack in the bearings. This makes the final press more stable and consistent, so as long as it doesn't bind it should be fine. I love how the machine looks, it appears like a DIY-project with no chance of being accurate, while actually performing well as far as I can tell. It'll be fun seeing how you continue working on this machine and seeing it appear as a tool in future videos.
Looking at the thumbnail, Matthias, you look like a young lad who is extremely proud of something that he built. And you should be. Your 'cheapness' provides a way for your ingenuity to shine. Thank you.
I was watching a review about a bench top drill press so that got me looking at other ones online. I was surprised just how expensive they've gotten lately.
My favourite quote of the year " I guess I have to put it together the Chinese way, With bigger mounting holes" Remind me of something I do alot, Fuck around and find out Love the work, Great video
Instead of the normal springs, consider gas springs to balance the weight of the spindle. Their change of force over stroke is way flatter than that of a normal spring. It's as if you start with a very preloaded spring (still Hooke's law, but you don't start a x = 0). I use two gas springs on my self built CNC (the moving Z part is about 14kg with 20cm of stroke), which work very well. They are also "best quality" gas springs (about 3€ a piece 😅) intended for cabinet lids. One end is fixed to the CNC frame (or rather X carriage), the other end has a pulley ("turned" on my drill press "lathe" 😉) and a bicycle gear shifter cable goes over that. That halves the force on the spindle, but doubles the travel. Since your machine has more Z travel, maybe gas springs that keep car trunk lids open are the right thing for you.
Matthias building machines was the main reason i subed so many years ago, so watching this brings a warm smile to my face. Thanks for the video Matthias
I built a slot moritiser in the same general family as yours using those same bearings, and found that while the bearing block castings are inaccurate (comically so), the hole pattern for mounting them is very accurate to the bore. It was some extremely tedious layout but it worked out. I did also use socket head screws and very slightly oversized holes, which obviously helped.
Always amazing to see what you can do with wood. It would be awesome to see a competition where you and someone else are given the same task, but you build it using wood, and another with metal. It would be interesting to see how someone else tackles the job, then compare cost, time, and effort between the two.
I make stuff out of metal and wood and it takes me a lot longer to work in metal than wood. But I don't have the heaviest metalworking tools. More like the lightest. But when I'm done metal is always a lot more substantial than wood is. Steel is the real deal.
This is a classic of MW where he can work around any "anomalies" in making things work. The moment I saw he bought a chunk of metal that resembled a spindle, I knew this was going to be a very interesting and entertaining one. Just 5 min into the video, I knew the parts look mostly factory rejects (=floor sweepings) that will need the ingenious mind to overcome the "CC (Cheap Chinese) parts
Another thing you might run into with those cheap linear rails is that the steel rail will detach from the base that it’s screwed into given enough force applied to them over time. It might be a good idea to take them apart and use thread lock red before you put them into use. I had that issue and it required a complete teardown of the CNC machine they were in. They’ve been fine ever since.
The gluing time is often the swearing time. I always feel terrible when I am out by a 1 mm, but if it happen to Matthias too, I feel a bit better. A YOLO CNC mill made of wood and cheapo mechanical elements seems so fun.
At my bachelor study (engineering!), The students rely on 3d printing for a lot of the projects. The university supports this, aquiring an army of printers. It is interesting to see that a band saw and a blok o'wood can give you stronger, precision parts at a fraction of the time that it would take you to print them. While 3d printers are often hailed as good at rapid prototyping i like that glueing some blocks together and sanding where nesicairy gives you the ability to "design as you go"(which, while fun is not always the right approach. It think an engineer should be familiar with both though). For hobby projects it is definetly better as an afternoon of screwing around in the shed is way more fun than an afternoon of screaming at solidworks
If you are designing something that will eventually be manufactured in quantity, 3D printing makes more sense. For one-off experimenting, less so. But the 3D printer is sort of the universal hammer, easier for people not handy, injuries unlikely.
Agree. I have been thinking this for years. I have some nice old metal lathes but no milling machine. I still have my woodshope but when I play it is general in metal.
Watching this video, I keep shaking my head in amazement at how you just start building and solve each problem as it comes up. If this were me I would be paralyzed for months on end trying to figure out how to do everything before I even start. Kudos to you.
Like the honest show of "failures", since I was planning to make an assembly video about my new dust collector and during the assembly I felt that I screwed up all the time. Didn't help that the instructions was really bad. And that I got bolts that wasn't in the plans with no information on where the different sizes should go. :)
They are sand cast after all, if they haven't been ground to precision, that's what you get. That sand cast rough texture is never going to give you an accurate surface to work with unless you machine it to within spec yourself. These blocks seem to be rejects and sold cheap. But that'll never stop Matthias from whipping them into shape.
No one ever does. But they always are. It's something I've run into a lot in DIY CNC forums. The fake THK stuff is all out of wack like these rounds ones too. What people do is they measure one and use it as the bolt pattern for all of them. They just assume they're all the same. Nope.
I've contemplated linear bearings as modifications to your earlier creation. I'll have to deal with those inaccurate parts. Thanks. Great work, as always.
This is a wonderful project, and exactly the kind of interesting "just because" kind of build that brought me to your channel in the first place. Quite a joyful thing to see once again!
Brilliant as usual Mr. Wizard! The only unsettling moment was when you were routing out the sheave with your fingers so close to the cutterhead. I guess I’m becoming a safety Sally, but that made me super nervous.
I know you love problem solving but. . . lol. Anyway after all those 'dodgy' parts you really did well, i'm impressed that your next video wont be, "How to Remove a Milling Machine from a Workshop Wall!" Well done Matthias and let me say, that scaling software of yours is tip-top. Since I bought it I use it all the time , it saves so much design-time, cheers.
Matthias, Very Very interesting! Great to see you designing and building a machine again. Don’t feel bad about the mistakes. We all get older and tend not to care so much about precisness as much when it doesn’t matter. Like you said, a hammer helps…haha. Thanks
Great project! Just to note that type of bearing are machined to be accurate only to the base and the screw holes, other dimensions are a result of casting, though even then there could be some small quality deficiencies in these cheap ones.
I have watched your inventions/innovations for years and have built a couple. I just love your creativity. I find your methods for problem solving particularly helpful.
Having struggled hand making a simple shelf with roughly $3000 worth of woodworking tools, I look at this like it's science fiction. You are a wizard, alien, and madman, all with the patience of a saint.
A wood milling machine? I love it. I liked your pulley making technique. How about a custom set of stepped pulleys? You'll likely need a couple of speeds.
I've always admired your commitment to precision, tempered by a cleareyed understanding of circumstances. Thousandths of tolerance, "but it's just plywood, so that's more than good enough."
I was chasing thousandths out of my CNC frame I made out of big box store lumber. I actually used a Hoke long gage block set to put it together. I had the blocks setup on jack stands. When they're built out for a few feet they're heavy.
