Built from DIY Builds' YouTube series (https://www.diybuilds.ca/) during the 2020 lockdown, from parts off eBay and Amazon, Home Depot plywood, and an engineering desktop pulled from the e-waste pile at work. Running in a few months. It's since cut the bar's sign and fluted casing on the Bar Build, amongst many other projects. After the initial build I applied some left-over heavy duty adjustable feet and amazon retractable wheels to the legs, and traded its DIN rail for linear rails on the Y axis.
This one came off a plan — DIY Builds' CNC series on YouTube, followed during the 2020 lockdown. It starts with the base: a table and shelf structure out of ¾" plywood with an MDF top. The plain part of the build, and the part everything else has to sit flat on.
The bed is a torsion box, about five feet square, all ¾" plywood. The ribs are half-lapped — each notched to half its depth so the crosswise ribs drop in and the grid interlocks — then skinned top and bottom with more plywood.
The gantry is ¾" plywood too, doubled up where its v-rollers ride the Y-axis rail, and it carries the beam — a plywood rectangle that the X-axis rails mount to. The Z axis rides on linear rails and moves on a lead screw, with a Makita palm router as the spindle.
NEMA 23 steppers, one per axis except Y, which gets two — one each side of the gantry. Each has its own driver board, fed by a local power supply, and they all run back to the controller, which talks to the computer over a parallel port. The engineering desktop pulled from the e-waste pile at work was old enough to still have one.
The control box is on hinges and swings out for maintenance. A relay brings everything up together at power-on. Six server fans pull the heat out, each on a potentiometer so the airflow can be dialed in. All the wiring is shielded and runs through a drag chain back to the box, with micro switches at each end of every axis as limits.
The computer is a Dell Precision T3400 running Windows XP and Mach3 for machine control; the G-code comes from VCarve Pro. The keyboard and mouse are PS/2 and the monitor is an old Acer LCD, all from a buddy who didn't need them anymore.
The T3400 got taken apart and cleaned, with fresh thermal pads and paste on the CPU and graphics card. Two more server fans went on the back, with a potentiometer reachable from the back panel to set their speed, and register vent filters over the intakes to try to keep the sawdust out.
Two upgrades in one. Levelling first: ¼" steel plates, cut and drilled, mounted on 4x4 scrap fixed to the existing legs, with the center hole tapped so a heavy-duty foot threads straight in. Then retractable wheels from Amazon, so the whole thing can roll around the garage and drop back onto its feet.
Nearly five years on, the Y axis got rebuilt in effort to reduce racking. The DIN rail came off and Vevor linear rails and bearings went on in its place. While it was apart, the joints between the gantry beam and its end caps were stiffened with 3/16" × 2" steel angle.
The first things it cut: the sample files that ship with Mach3, then my name a couple of times, then an inlay pattern of an S. By Christmas it was making 2020 dumpster fire ornaments, which was the right thing for a machine finished that year to be making.