Aubreys Robots - CNC Mill Page
My mill has gone thru a few re-births since it started.
Initially it was going to mill pc boards only so I started with 2 printer cartridge carrages as an experiment. I very quickly realised that the mechanical strength of the carrages in the printer would not be robust enough to mill a pc board.
Then I decided to make it a little bit bigger so that components for my robots could be milled.
Messed around with various slide designs and materials
Some were more successfull than others
Got a couple of nice stepper motors to use
Specs on Stepper Motor:
Name : Astrosyn
Model : MiniAngle Stepper
Type : 23LM-C351-03
Voltage : 10v
Degrees per Step : 1.8
VA Rating : 5.0
Serial No : H7922
Country of Manufacture : Japan
Manufactured By : Minebea Co Ltd
After painting I decided that the sliding block guides were not going to be good enough so I built a carrage to support the t-bolt plate and use small bearings to run on the guides.
The guides are towl rail tubing that I had lying around at the time.
These will be replaced by nice strong hardchromed shafts that I have stripped out of old McPhereson strut replacement cartridges from some or other large Toyota or Nissan.
Not too happy with the motor mount, screw connection or anti-backlash nut yet. Will have to do some work on those!
Once I have gotten all the dimensioning and shaping of the carrage support right, I'll get my pal Tony (who has an aluminium foundry) to cast it in aluminium.
Note that ALL MACHINING up to this point was done on a drill press with a cheap XY vice. Now that I have a REAL lathe/Milling Machine, things should go a lot faster and a lot more accurately.
There is still some whip on the leadscrew (16mm * 2mm pitch) but I think it is the coupler that is not 100% true.
Now that I have a proper dividing head (on the lathe/mill) I think I'm going to make up some nice compact couplers out of aluminium. Maybe that will solve the problem. Hope so!
None! 2550-12-08 : Been having fun on CNC-Zone.com. ;>}
PaulG opened up a sub-thread so that we can see whether we can put together a collaberative project to get around the Window$ timing/que issues.
Its still early days but there seems to be some "Why bother? - there are existing ways to do it!" comments coming in. No Problem! We will have to see where it goes!
None 2005-12-10 : Friday nite did some work on modifying a project management system that I wrote a while back (in ASP/MSSQL) to work on a PHP/MySQL platform to manage this project. Will test it on this site soon! (with PaulG of CNC-Zone.com's blessing.) Once it is de-bugged, will ask CNC-Zone to host it IF this project gets started.
Speaking of which, I must say that the CNC-Zone.com forum software is pretty neat and user friendly but Forum methodology and Project Management methodology differ, which is why I am doing the project software.
None! 2550-12-12 : The mill is currently in a friends (Paul) workshop and he is busy playing around getting a PICKit set up to drive the motors so that we can set the mill up properly (guide rail bearings and perpendicularity of the various axis with regard to each other) when the time is right.
Looks like I'll be suspending work on the injector and completing the mill over Chrismas/New Year.
None 2005-12-12 : DARN!!!!!!
Did the project manager app in PHP. Seems the version on my dev machine is not the same as on this site.
MySQL commands crashing all over the place....... :>{
Suppose now would be a good time to figure out how th make the app sense the PHP version and then apply the appropriate MySQL command set. Should be interesting!
While I'm about it, I'll make this site code (currently hardcoded HTML) into a DB backended app. It should make the updating a lot easier!
2005-12-13 - Got the Base/X axis back from Paul this evening so that work does not stop when my grand daughters arive and I have to cordon off the injector machine project.
Here is the gantry plates that will carry the Y and Z assemblys.