Well we have finally started to assemble our router after much procrastination (i got lazy and stopped staying late and making the pieces after hours)
Router isn't anything fancy, this is just a first 'feel it out' build using the widely available jgro design only we lengthened it to 97" instead of the called for 48ish
Our tape measure math says we have a 5x16x90 inch cutting envelope. Using some ebay 680oz/inch stepper motors, a cheapy 4axis driver board with a couple of outputs to run the vac table and probably a vacuum at the router head and going to control it all though mach3
We thought we could build it for around 300, however i got greedy and spent more than that on the motors alone, the board was another 200, we have over 150 in barrings etc etc, probably around 1k for this build now and were using threaded rod for lead screws, cant afford some nice acme rod right now
Well enough of the talking, here are some pics, sorry about the poor focus, my camera is mia and all i had is my phone tonight.
Good work!
I'm into this(cnc) aswell now. I also looked at the "jgro" design, but I will try to modify it to be belt driven. Just my choice, but someone whispered that it will be much faster.
How do you experience the speed of your machine? Slow, OK or fast? But I guess the accuracy will come in the first room. Looking forward for progress posts. A video?...
Well it isnt wired so i cant give actual speeds. However without hitting critical speed's of our leadscrew's in the Y axis (the longest of them) we should get slightly better than 120ipm with about 4tenths accuracy not accounting for the prob 10thouh of backlash, endplay and slop im going to have being its made mostly of MDF
Still 120imp is damn quick, rough math says we can profile and cutout a board from a solid planned rectangle in 56min including cutouts for tip and tail material, sidewalls, and binding holes and having the whole thing profiled
I may go with a belt drive the second router build, however we didnt want to stray to far from the original design, and plus its damn cheap this way
ill post vid's when its wired up which should be sooner than later
What are the result with your wooden less than 1k$ cnc?
Any video if you have?
I am very interested since I can't afford to pay more than that.
And I wonder if it is worth spending months on a home made cnc if it is not precise enough to cut my templates & profile my cores.
thx
Could you tell me where you buy your cnc? I want to buy one but I don't find any cnc with the perfect size (in europe) or it was too expensive for me... you know something around 20000 swiss francs
Our router is based off a free design called the JGRO, plans for it can be found at cnczone.com or maby though your fav search engine.
We have somewhere around 1,500.00 usd into this so far and its good for what it is. An all aluminium build would be much better, id reccomend that over a wood / mdf build.
Thank you for your answer.
Do you use it to profile cores? I fear the wooden structure of the cnc cannot cope with the efforts involved. What is your experience with that?
Did you have to re inforce the jgro (structure? Electronic?) to make it adapted to a table a long as a ski (2m for instance)?
Last edited by Gougouneux on Tue Jan 11, 2011 1:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We will use it to profile cores, its back apart again so we can convert it to leaner bearings and rack and pinion on all 3 axis. It will work fine for it
The wood is weak, i would suggest going with a aluminium/steel build right away. we are slowly replacing everything with both, except for the cutting table which is replaceable and will stay mdf.
We had to beef up the table due to the length, and doubled the size of the motors the plans called for and run them at 10x the rated voltage to keep everything fast.
jvangelder wrote:
We had to beef up the table due to the length, and doubled the size of the motors the plans called for and run them at 10x the rated voltage to keep everything fast.
A lot of people say one of the weakness of JGRO design are the two pipes on which the gantry rely. Did you re inforce it to have a 2m long table?
