CNC router/mill

I had been wanting to build a CNC router/mill for a while, so finally on January 2021 I designed this contraption, with the help of the folks at cnczone. I originally wanted to go for an aluminum or even concrete frame, but as a first project and for ease of construction and economic reasons it ended up being wood. It is intended for cutting woods and plastics, and PCB milling. I'll try some alumi(ni)um when I'm familiar enough with feeds and speeds.

I then proceeded to cut out all wooden pieces, finishing the edges with a hand-held router so that they were reasonably straight.

When summer came and all parts (rails, leadscrews, steppers..) arrived, I began gluing all the pieces together and test-fiting parts. Areas where linear rails mounted were soaked in epoxy to protect the wood. Holes were drilled and tapped for the appropiate sizes, regular machine screws would latter hold things together, with some drops of wood glue to secure them semi-permanently in place.

A workbench was also built. This would help during assembly and later hold the finished machine. It was an exercise in cost reduction, and it proved more than adequate. In this photo below, the 3d printed supports that would later hold the router in place are also visible.

Here are all the finished pieces, painted and ready for assembly:

And here is the finished machine:

Here is a video of some of the first g-code that ever run on the machine. As it can be seen, some rubber covers were added to protect rails and ballscrews.

And here are some pictures of the first parts that came out of it:

It quickly became apparent that an enclosure was needed in order to manage the dust, so one was built and here is the finished product:

And here are the temporary electronics, currently using an arduino running grbl and a solid-state realy to turn the spindle on and off. The obligatory emergency stop cuts power to the whole thing.