Mostly Printed CNC
Building the Base
Finally, following pay day, I’ve been able to get the last bits to finish this project. First up is the base which I’ve decided to build from melamine-laminated chipboard as it should be easy to glue waste boards to and remove them afterwards. The board is 18mm thick so I’ve built a frame with 3x2 timber to give it more rigidity. I’ll probably build some legs for it to make it a bit more moveable but with the price of planed timber as it is … well, let’s just say it might have to wait a while - it’ll be fine on the workbench in the meantime.
Here’s the bare frame and the frame with the board fitted:
After that was done, fitting the CNC frame was trivial. The work area ended up having to be slightly narrower than I’d originally planned because the widest board I could buy was 610mm. This meant some of the tubes needed to be shortened but the work area is still a perfectly adequate size. Here’s where I’ve left it for the evening:
The next step is wiring the electronics and my 400W router spindle should be arriving any day so it won’t be long until I’m able to get this up and running.
Posted on 28 July 2016
