Fecn
Established Member
Because I retired a bunch of old servers, I had some spare heavy-duty rackmount kits. They're basically just massive drawer slides designed to take up to a quarter of a tonne each. I also had some more conventional drawer slides too.
Last Thursday, I paid a visit to Richard Russel and bought myself some moustire resistant MDF - I've read on this forum somewhere or other that it has very little movement. I cut the sheets in half in their carpark because my van isn't quite long enough for a full 2440mm sheet.
The rackmount kits had some clips which locked the rails in place when fully extended - They had to go. I cut away their fixings with my dremmel.
Because I knew I'd be doing a lot of tablesaw work for this one, I made some space in the garage and set up the dust extractor and a couple of roller stands to support the sheet goods during cuts.
I made the smallest drawer first. Being the smallest one, it can be a touch more leightweight, so i used 25mm thickness. I clamped the sides as squarely as I could and drilled and screwed using 60x4 screws.
Next up, I mounted a set of drawer slides. The sheet of MDF that the thing's resting on was so that I could get things as absolutely perfectly square and parallel as possible.
Have you worked out what it is yet.... No.. probably not... I did tell you in the title, but that won't make much sense yet... Keep reading
The smallest drawer slides I had had a protruding bit on the end which stuck out about five millimeters.I used a forstner bit and cut recesses in the end plate to hide the offending bit.
I used a fence and an endstop on my drill-press to ensure that I would be able to get two recesses in perfect alignment on either side of the bearing-support block. Then I drilled through with a 3/8th hole to allow the shaft to pass through.
The next shot might give it away to a few of you...
I bought 4 x 1 metre lenghts of M8x1.5 threaded bar. It cost me £3.40. I also bought a whole load of bearings that were about 43p each. They keep the threaded bar mostly friction free.
I spent a few hours trying to work out a way of making some kind of support for holding an M8 nut and more importantly, allowing some reasonable degree of adjustment. I tried a few different things and none of them worked as well as I wanted, so in the end I gave up for the night.
The next morning, I realised the solution to the problem was not to use a nut at all, but to make a threaded plate instead of the nut. I put a bit of left-over gate post on the drill press and drilled a 6.5mm and two 5mm holes. The centre hole I tapped to M8.
I cut it out as a rectangular chunk with my dremmel. RIP Dremmel - This was the last job it could handle.. Sniff sniff.
I figured that the threaded plate would have to stand up to a lot of wear and tear and that it might survive for longer if it the steel was hardened... so I annealed it. Heated it to cherry-red and then dunked it in a bucket of water.
The parts for the larger drawers...
Fitting the drawer slides in the largest one...
Sorry this one's a bit blurry - I used three drawer slides per unit. Two in one orientation and one in the other. This almost totally eliminates the jiggle that you normally get with a pair of drawer slides.
OK.. if you haven't worked out what I've built yet, here's my sketchup. It's not quite how things ended up, but at least it looks similar.
The three axes assembled with their stepper motors.
View from the other end...
Y & Z axes squared up and bolted together.
I wasn't happy with the amount of jiggle on the Z axis, so I added a second pair of drawer slides.
I made some simple side supports to hold the Y/Z assembly in the right place, and then squared it all up with shims before screwing things into place.
View from the back. with the gantry balanced on top.
Y & Z axes mostly extended.
Gantry section bolted into place. Stretchers added to give a bit more rigidity.
Today, I got the chance to get started on the electricals. Two power supplies and three stepper motor drivers needed wiring in. I escaped to the shed for a few hours this afternoon and got it all done.
Just before dinner time, I connected it up to a spare laptop and installed a copy of some CNC software called Mach3. - If you hadn't got it by now, that should be the final clue. I've built my own CNC router.
After dinner and baby-bed-time, I nipped back to the shed, and cobbled together the most simple and rudimentary tool holder I could think of. The shaft on the dremmel-replacement is exactly 20mm. I drilled a 20mm hole through a bit of 12mm mdf, and added a single piece of insulation tape to slightly reduce the diameter.. Then push-fitted the proxxon.
I fitted a 3mm straight-cutting bit and clamped a bit of scrap to the bed.
First test.. .sawdust flies... around 21:30 tonight.
I spent another hour or so trying to work out how to use the CNC software to do something a bit more creative and had all sorts of annoying and strange error messages to try and solve. '0 radius turn at line 1016'. Eventually, I found a shape-cutting wizzard which worked and got it to cut out a little square hole at around 22:30.
I have to say, I'm very very pleased with the result. I designed it to be able to handle a full sized router, so it's all very solid. Thanks to the three slides per axis setup, there's very little movement or jiggle. I seem to have done a pretty good job of aligning my axes. I'm planning on adding a sacraficial surface to the X bed and I'll shim that to correct any misalignment there.
In total, including the sketchup drawings, the project's taken my spare time for the past 7 days. It can cope with workpieces up to 700x500x150mm in size, and should be accurate enough that I can use it for making printed circuit boards too. I'm not really finished yet - I still need to paint or varnish it, and to make some better support frames for the proxxon and my old B&Q router, and make some suitable clamps for it too.
Still, as of 22:30 tonight, it's officially up and working, and here's a 1-minute video clip (5MB) to prove it.
Last Thursday, I paid a visit to Richard Russel and bought myself some moustire resistant MDF - I've read on this forum somewhere or other that it has very little movement. I cut the sheets in half in their carpark because my van isn't quite long enough for a full 2440mm sheet.
The rackmount kits had some clips which locked the rails in place when fully extended - They had to go. I cut away their fixings with my dremmel.
Because I knew I'd be doing a lot of tablesaw work for this one, I made some space in the garage and set up the dust extractor and a couple of roller stands to support the sheet goods during cuts.
I made the smallest drawer first. Being the smallest one, it can be a touch more leightweight, so i used 25mm thickness. I clamped the sides as squarely as I could and drilled and screwed using 60x4 screws.
Next up, I mounted a set of drawer slides. The sheet of MDF that the thing's resting on was so that I could get things as absolutely perfectly square and parallel as possible.
Have you worked out what it is yet.... No.. probably not... I did tell you in the title, but that won't make much sense yet... Keep reading
The smallest drawer slides I had had a protruding bit on the end which stuck out about five millimeters.I used a forstner bit and cut recesses in the end plate to hide the offending bit.
I used a fence and an endstop on my drill-press to ensure that I would be able to get two recesses in perfect alignment on either side of the bearing-support block. Then I drilled through with a 3/8th hole to allow the shaft to pass through.
The next shot might give it away to a few of you...
I bought 4 x 1 metre lenghts of M8x1.5 threaded bar. It cost me £3.40. I also bought a whole load of bearings that were about 43p each. They keep the threaded bar mostly friction free.
I spent a few hours trying to work out a way of making some kind of support for holding an M8 nut and more importantly, allowing some reasonable degree of adjustment. I tried a few different things and none of them worked as well as I wanted, so in the end I gave up for the night.
The next morning, I realised the solution to the problem was not to use a nut at all, but to make a threaded plate instead of the nut. I put a bit of left-over gate post on the drill press and drilled a 6.5mm and two 5mm holes. The centre hole I tapped to M8.
I cut it out as a rectangular chunk with my dremmel. RIP Dremmel - This was the last job it could handle.. Sniff sniff.
I figured that the threaded plate would have to stand up to a lot of wear and tear and that it might survive for longer if it the steel was hardened... so I annealed it. Heated it to cherry-red and then dunked it in a bucket of water.
The parts for the larger drawers...
Fitting the drawer slides in the largest one...
Sorry this one's a bit blurry - I used three drawer slides per unit. Two in one orientation and one in the other. This almost totally eliminates the jiggle that you normally get with a pair of drawer slides.
OK.. if you haven't worked out what I've built yet, here's my sketchup. It's not quite how things ended up, but at least it looks similar.
The three axes assembled with their stepper motors.
View from the other end...
Y & Z axes squared up and bolted together.
I wasn't happy with the amount of jiggle on the Z axis, so I added a second pair of drawer slides.
I made some simple side supports to hold the Y/Z assembly in the right place, and then squared it all up with shims before screwing things into place.
View from the back. with the gantry balanced on top.
Y & Z axes mostly extended.
Gantry section bolted into place. Stretchers added to give a bit more rigidity.
Today, I got the chance to get started on the electricals. Two power supplies and three stepper motor drivers needed wiring in. I escaped to the shed for a few hours this afternoon and got it all done.
Just before dinner time, I connected it up to a spare laptop and installed a copy of some CNC software called Mach3. - If you hadn't got it by now, that should be the final clue. I've built my own CNC router.
After dinner and baby-bed-time, I nipped back to the shed, and cobbled together the most simple and rudimentary tool holder I could think of. The shaft on the dremmel-replacement is exactly 20mm. I drilled a 20mm hole through a bit of 12mm mdf, and added a single piece of insulation tape to slightly reduce the diameter.. Then push-fitted the proxxon.
I fitted a 3mm straight-cutting bit and clamped a bit of scrap to the bed.
First test.. .sawdust flies... around 21:30 tonight.
I spent another hour or so trying to work out how to use the CNC software to do something a bit more creative and had all sorts of annoying and strange error messages to try and solve. '0 radius turn at line 1016'. Eventually, I found a shape-cutting wizzard which worked and got it to cut out a little square hole at around 22:30.
I have to say, I'm very very pleased with the result. I designed it to be able to handle a full sized router, so it's all very solid. Thanks to the three slides per axis setup, there's very little movement or jiggle. I seem to have done a pretty good job of aligning my axes. I'm planning on adding a sacraficial surface to the X bed and I'll shim that to correct any misalignment there.
In total, including the sketchup drawings, the project's taken my spare time for the past 7 days. It can cope with workpieces up to 700x500x150mm in size, and should be accurate enough that I can use it for making printed circuit boards too. I'm not really finished yet - I still need to paint or varnish it, and to make some better support frames for the proxxon and my old B&Q router, and make some suitable clamps for it too.
Still, as of 22:30 tonight, it's officially up and working, and here's a 1-minute video clip (5MB) to prove it.
