Some background on me and on the project (oh and my first blog post!)

This blog is intended as a way of sharing my interest in home-made CNC machines and machining with the wider world.  I’ve been interested in CNC milling for years after seeing some pretty interesting videos on YouTube a few years ago, having done some manual milling whilst doing my apprenticeship I could understand just how amazing these machines actually were, and how difficult the tasks they were performing would be to accomplish.  I kept an eye on the technology whilst doing the first part of my degree and this turned into doing a placement year with a DELCAM as part of my degree course, for those that don’t know, DELCAM are like the Rolls-Royce of CADCAM software and are the biggest supplier and experts in this sort of software.

During my year with DELCAM I got to spend some time in their on-site machine shop looking at everything from micro-machining of teeth to machining huge pieces of stone with a robot cell (as well as the 5-axis aerospace parts!).  When I went back to University to do my last year of my degree course, I designed and built a small desktop CNC from aluminium and stepper motors, luckily I didn’t have to pay for the materials as it ended up costing around £500.  This project paved the way for the work seen in this blog and gave me some really great ideas to reduce costs and simplify the build process.  Unfortunately when I graduated I joined another company and lost access to any sort of CNC equipment, so project “Super-cheap-CNC-mill” came into action!

The project covers the construction and build of what I believe to be the cheapest and more importantly easiest CNC milling machine to have been documented on the internet and everything used has been chosen to be CHEAP and EASY to use, therefore there are LOTS of areas where there could be improvements in performance, so please don’t bear this in mind before giving one of the usual “you should have used ball screws and linear bearing” type comments!  I gathered all of the material together and made a start on Saturday morning, by Saturday evening I was running my first piece of code! That’s 8 hours to build!