Looking forward to your series. Sounds like a fellow Aussie that is living in the State's? I have a Hafco HM52 vert/horiz mill I've been tempted to CNC, but it's not a NEED, so hasn't happened yet. Do have an industrial CNC router, (3.6 x1.6M cutting area), I salvaged & added a AXBB-E controller to, which then made 3d routing possible, which in itself was a fairly long process to get right. So I understand where you are coming from. Good luck.
You tagged me - glad my Aussie accent has not become too corrupted to recognize The Hafco has a great reputation - the project time is always longer than we imagine
Nice build, congrats! Doors opening externally is a mistake, flood coolant will be on them and when you open, it will flow and drip on the floor. I made a kind of mistake like this, making the door opening upwards. This is awful, because coolant will drip from the door onto your head and hands when you are working to setup a part. So only sliding doors inside the cage it's the only right option here.
I hear yopu on the doors, but the space limitations mean that sliding doors just dont work for me I decide to do mist coolant for the near term and have an upcoming video on a Mystbuster to reduce airborn pollutants
That is an intersting idea, but a lot of work and keeping the joints of the door sealed against flood coolant would be a challenge. The amount of mist coolant is not very high and I will put up with a few drips for now
Wow - huge job - I always worried about getting the accuracy and repeatability out of the machine if building from scratch - I did consider filling the base of the PMV-728V-T but given how tight the eventaul installation was, I am glad I ddi not have to deal with the extra weight
Awesome series, I'm still on the fence between buying one or going the same route and diy it. Buying is more expensive, although i do wonder what the total amounts to when you start looking at the hours you need to spend to get there. 🤔
I hear you. At the time (and now 🤣) I could not affot $15+ for a mill and I have a ned to understand everything in detail, so the time tradeoff made sense
Can’t wait to see how you completed the wiring as I also have the clearpath servos and the acorn. I haven’t been able to complete my cnc router as I’m been too anxious to work on the electronics. Really looking forward to this video series!
I hear you - it is kinda daunting, but between teknics and the acorn wiring diagrams there is a lot of good assistance - it is all the little stuff like making sure all the grounds are tied together, use of relays and snubbers - hopefully the wiring video will get you started
Have you hade a chance to check out the full directory of Centroid wiring diagrams? I ended up combining a couple and will be sharing my final version in the electronics build - if you need something a bit earlier I can copy version I updated by hand an d send it via email
Pretty much all of them over the last few years including Print Reading They have just added a new CNC course for multi-axis machining. The surpising thing is that one way and another they have pretty much provided free education and the machinging labs supply all the materials
currently, my issue is the electronics. PC power supply literally exploded the other day. dug out another unit, did have win10, but bricked when trying to install linuxcnc. couldnt get win10 to recognise pcie to parallel port card. or the three usb to parallel motion controller/breakout boards i wasted a few hundred on. so no loss there. tracked down monitor that was working last time i powered it up. nope. dead. another monitor. thats right, it requires some oddball 14V supply with a screwball proprietary plug. had to go buy another keyboard and mouse. dug out the old flatscreen TV. oh yeah... meant to throw it out as the bottom 2 inches of screen has turned to indecipherable flickering lines. the pc that had win 10 is now refusing to boot, at all. not even bios. no beeps or anything. booted up fine when i tried that XP install last night... that didnt install. said it was corrupt. probably is, being a download ISO. but it installed a year ago no issues, before trying linuxcnc. i havent used my mill in about ten years since the ancient 98 machine i had crashed for the final time, destroyed a week long project, and received said project thrown, hard, through the mobo. along with a handy hammer and a vice. i vaguely recall making a coil winder at some point, only a few years ago, and that was no issue at all, using all the old gear i had, and another PC. that crashed its HDD. and there was another reason i gave it up for my one and only current working machine... i forget now. its all a blurry mess... all my spare ATX supplies seem to have blown caps or simply dont turn on anymore. dont really want to relinquish my mach3 license. or gearotic license. or the gecko g540. or power supply for gecko. everytime i go look at linuxcnc or other options i wind up spending a week searching through forum boards and running in circles with acronyms, hunting down this, figuring out that. all for no end result but getting pissed off. i am absolutely sick and tired of modern, and "not so modern" electronics, filesystems, acronyms, things that cant be turned on or off directly when the power buttons are pressed, legacy, EFI, UEFI, ATA, SATA, ACHPI, power on, power down, unplug, power on, power down, replug, power down... blah blah blah blah... things that work the previous night but not today, and yeah... just an old girl, with a parallel port, with 98, xp, win7, and i would be up and running... or at least something that would recognise some type of motion controller. but you know what? computer says "no". each and every bloody one i try. really am in no mood to sacrifice the current one that i type this on, as its all ive got that actually works. even its decided the front USB sockets wont work anymore. and if i even look at it it demands i reboot, and that means i have to remove the video card to get it to run VGA as it refuses to run HDMI on the only monitor i have that appears to also work when i want to access bios... and then requires the rigmarole of getting nvidia drivers to work on linux again when the video cards reinserted. over it. really am over it. fifteen odd years ago, this CNC conversion was easy, but expensive. PCs worked and everything seemed to be swappable, replaceable, and worked. some type of consistent standard. now? i just want to kill something... usually myself. i just dont get how some people have absolutely no issue with this stuff... because its really got it in for me now. and just seems to get worse everyday. of course, the actual mill and the rebuild is going fine and proving to be far less finnicky than it was back then. new ballscrews, a good scrape, and its just bolting together without this fiddly tweaking to get screws aligned so they wont grind, gibs adjusted so theyre not binding or wriggling... now i just wanna see the Y axis move before i start finalising the X. cant win. just cant win. *sticks to manual for the foreseeable future*
doh - i hear you - somtimes my 3D printers work. charm and then other days they just dont want to behave I am keeping the manual mill and lathe for one off projects, but do like the opprtunity to cut curves and gears with CNC
I’m just about to purchase a PM bed mill with the intention of converting it to CNC. I was thinking about sourcing my own ball screws for uncompromising accuracy but your warning has given me pause. What tolerance do you think you will be able to achieve with your setup? Nice video.
I was origainally intending to go with ground rather than rolled ball screws but the cost was really high and frankly the companies I found at that time really kept missing key informaion in their product descriptions. Honestly, I was still learning a lot about all of the underlying considerations - today I would happily sourcve them dirtectly To answer your original question, there is a video on commissionaing and callibartion somewher in the future - lots more than ball screw precision come in obviously but I am down to less than 0.001" after wrking to elimniate all the other potential sources of backlash
You are certainly welcome to your own definitions, but what the series is claiming is a DIY CNC Mill, not a DIY Mill Do you have a pointer to the mill you built? I would love to see what you built and what construction techniques you used
Hmmm - you may not understand the the distribution of effort - the kit in this case is just the ballscrews and adapters - electronics, motors, and a bunch of other stuff requires research and individual choices - stick around, I think you'll see ...
