Making a CNC from scratch

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Don't have $10000000 to buy your very own CNC? Have some programming skills and some Meccano pieces kicking around?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdPZBosgOg4


My lady friend is getting me an Arduino starter kit for christmas...this is one project I eventually want to make.


http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/valkyrie_100_diy_cnc_machine_aka.html
http://reprap.org/
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1211812224
 
I've seen some of the stuff you've built, this is childs play! The homemade CNC's I've seen around on the net are mostly constructed from cheap wood, skateboard bearings, stepper motors from old dot matrix printers, Arduino kits and code. Oh, and a Dremel.
 
wow man that would be awesome! be nice not to have to drive to the shop to use the stuff there... may have to look into that. very cool
 
it looks like a cool machine to have. I just don't think it would be really rigid or powerful enough to machine aluminum. Looks great for wood though.
 
Been there, done that ;)

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRJ3V-MjMKo[/youtube]

With a plasmacutter. It's actually not really mine, only partly. The guy I'm building a XV920 chopper with build and designed most of it.
 
Can you program a CNC machine to make and assemble another CNC machine?

Make sure you machine 'SKYNET' into the side of it.
 
mothgils said:
it looks like a cool machine to have. I just don't think it would be really rigid or powerful enough to machine aluminum. Looks great for wood though.
Click to expand...

+1 on this but man that would be nice to have to play around with making little caps and what not.
 
Retrofit kits to add to bridgeports are/were fairly cheap, and surprisingly accurate.
 
4eyes said:
Retrofit kits to add to bridgeports are/were fairly cheap, and surprisingly accurate.
Click to expand...

One of my uncle's bridgeports is CNC.

What kind of software is used for programming CNC projects? It would be so cool to learn that stuff. Hell, if I new what I was doing, my uncle might let me use it!
 
we use CAD/CAM but also Linux as well sometimes... depends on what we are doing and what machines we are running
 
noexit said:
One of my uncle's bridgeports is CNC.

What kind of software is used for programming CNC projects? It would be so cool to learn that stuff. Hell, if I new what I was doing, my uncle might let me use it!
Click to expand...

The retrofits for Bridgeports come with there own software. For part of my senior engineering project, our group did retrofitting/testing on an old Bridgeport. They are rather accurate and much less expensive than a large scale CNC machine.

For my machines at work, I import and AutoCAD file into our programming software and select my toolpath, tools, feeds/speeds, etc, and have the post (what creates the code) setup so that it spits out the program. We use EdgeCAM for that.
 
There are plenty of open source software projects to run these home brew CNC's
Example --> http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/DriverSoftware

Also check out the CupCake CNC 3D printer. It uses what looks like the tip of a glue gun to 'draw' 3-D out of 3mm ABS strands. It's interesting that generation 1 CupCakes were used to make generation 2, and so on. The machines are literally building themselves.

http://www.makerbot.com/


I don't think any of these low-end home brew CNC are powerful enough to fab bike parts...but it's fascinating all the same. :)
 
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