Archives for July, 2007

Weekend Wrapup

Posted on Jul 22, 2007 under Uncategorized | No Comment

New enclosure for the electronics, as well as some nice pretty wiring conduit. Definitely better than it was before.

Old:

New:

Spent plenty of time working on a fixture plate. It will allow better mounting when the 2″ vise won’t work. Circuit boards, engraving, etc.

Many holes and much tapping later..

Friday fixins

Posted on Jul 21, 2007 under Uncategorized | No Comment

Latest step was to mount some home switches to the mill. These little things will keep the mill from crashing into the chassis if it encounters some bad G-Code. These 3 switches are mounted on the X,Y,Z axes. The software corrects for the boundry on the other side of each axis.

I plugged in the pen mount and did a test with it.

Each round of the spiral is 1/32″ apart. Tiny.

Historic TAIG Post

Posted on Jul 21, 2007 under Uncategorized | No Comment

I received the final parts for my CNC mill 3 days ago, and I figured I’d start by posting all the pics, parts, and documentation I have produced up through that day.

The first bits came in last week, in a few pieces below:

I had purchased a small lathe a while back and made a couple simple projects out of it while waiting for the CNC(mosty chess pieces out of aluminum).

Here’s the completed setup, minus the motors and controller. Kind of a dead-weight without those.

Here’s a small tool I made. I epoxied a pen to a piece of aluminum, then sawed, drilled, and tapped a slot of aluminum on the other side. The pen had it’s spring-load modified, so it will start to retract into the body when the pen force on the paper reaches a certain amount.

The motors/controller came, and I quickly put the rest together and fired it up:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9mxTwRO-LOM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=STvcM2YlMRo

Very first cut with the mill. (Technically, I had the steps-per-inch set incorrectly, so those letters should have been the full height of the board.)

That’s it