Last night, Mike and I finished mounting the last motor to the CNC frame (the Y-motor), as well as the delrin nuts to the Z and Y rod housings.  (This was after I disassembled, drilled holes in, and reassembled the wrong part.  Mike, ever the gentleman, politely suggested that I "potentially" drilled the wrong plate, before fixing my mistake. Heh.) 

Now that it's done, the final design moves our stage (i.e. the workpiece) in the X direction (about 24" of travel), and the router moves in Y (about 12" of travel) and Z (about 5" of travel).  Mike also donated a new router bit to the cause - one which can plunge into our workpiece (and which is about 10 years newer than the bit we had on the router before).  

When all was set (and after we tried to find Marshall to share in the first CNC test), we turned the router on for the first time (which is to say we plugged it into a power strip and hit the 'on' button).  That thing is enormously fast, and it sounded like an airplane engine buzzing loudly in the little shop.  Both our eyes widened, and we kind of adopted the same stance soccer players do when they line up for a penalty kick.  Gonna have to get a plastic case to enclose the whole apparatus soon.

But then we mounted a piece of foam on the stage, plunged the router bit, and jogged the motors around.  It worked great.  Below is the very first piece we cut:

The image is a little hard to decipher - it's a piece of foam block, about 12"x24" and 4" deep (the larger cut is about 6" across).  We just traced out a few random shapes.  Lots of fun, but we quickly wanted to see what we could do with wood.  We took turns operating the controls of the motors while the other kept an eye on the stages (we don't have emergency stops yet when the stages reach the end-of-travel), as well as kept a hand on the off-switch to the router.

Here's my piece:

 and a close-up:

Even though I wrote the directions of the motors on a piece of paper and taped it to the computer monitor (counter-clockwise = "away" from each motor; "clockwise" = towards each motor), I still made a few errors jogging around the workpiece.  (It took a while to realize that moving the stage "away" from the motor essentially means moving the router bit in the opposite direction - a bit counter-intuitive at first).  I tried writing the word Steampunk, but clearly ran out of room.  Heh.

So now we've finished what we consider Phase 1 of the project - the mechanical and electrical infrastructure.  Now we're really looking forward to moving onto Phase 2 - getting the software to work (creating CAD files; converting those files to a toolpath; then converting the toolpath to commands for the individual stepper motors to carve the shape).  After that, we'll have fun in the final Phase 3 of this project - learning the "sweet-spot" processing parameters to efficiently, accurately, and aesthetically cut different materials (wood, plastic, wax, metal, glass) with different router bits, cutting speeds, travel speeds, set-ups, etc.  Great fun!

Heh.... 

Last week, I finally finished cleaning up the workshop, and declared myself ready for a new project.  I met briefly with Drew and Matthew (two new members interested in some fun projects), and their parents at Milo, and we agreed to start working together a few weeks from now.  Until then, we'll communicate over the web on this site.

However, that leaves a few weeks of mischief to get into between now and then. 

Marshall and I sat down and agreed that a cool project to build would be a CNC machine.  (He suggested it, I agreed).  This is a cutting tool (such as a router, a rotozip, or a mill), which is controlled by computer, to cut shapes automatically.  They can either be 2D shapes (by cutting pieces out of plywood or sheet metal), or they can be 3D shapes (like carving a large block of wood or plastic).  Additionally, it's possible to create 3D shapes from many layers of 2D pieces, by stacking and laminating plywood pieces, foam pieces, etc.  Then, those 3D shapes can either be the final product, or can serve as the "mold" from which to make fiberglass lay-ups, or ceramic castings, etc.

I put this on as a "potential future project" on the Projects list of this site.

Then I sent out smoke signals the next day, asking my technically-oriented friends if they'd like to join us.  Coincidentally, the same day Marshall and I decided to do CNC work, our friend Mike had made the same decision, and indeed had purchased some Printed Circuit Board (PCB) material to etch his own circuits for a CNC machine.  Lucky syzygy! :-)  With his help, I think we can start in earnest.

Originally we decided we'd start small, and build the example project described on the Instructables site.  However, I figured if we're going to spend the effort to build a small CNC machine, we may as well spend nearly the same amount of effort and build a beefy one. :-)  Thus, I bought a 3-axis stepper motor kit from Stepperworld.com, and this evening we'll be making decisions about what kind of cutting tools we'll use.

I also recently bought a 40 amp plasma cutter.  Perhaps we can do CNC machining, routing, carving -and- plasma cutting. :-)

I think it's time to start a new blog about this project. :-D