Benchtop CNC Milling Machine (on hold)

[Brian_H]

Likewise, when you decide to to move ahead with converting your HF MM let me know. I can mill out the underside of the table for your ballscrew clearance, tap holes, and also make any necessary brackets.

I had a similarly sized cnc benchtop mill years back, a Taig. It's major downsides are that it has acme screws rather than ballscrews, rigid couplings from the steppers to the leadscrews rather than flexible ones so it is prone to binding and stalling during travel, the spindle motor is very heavy and offset to one side so the Z axis tends to bind up, and also the V belt would constant flip around backwards on the pulleys... Taig sent me a new pulley and that fixed that problem though. The construction is pretty simple; the frame is simply welded 2" square steel tubing with some machined blocks attached as ways. I always thought that if it were 4"x4"x.25" wall pipe instead of 2" it would be quite a rigid frame. Fill the tube up with solid epoxy for dampening. Can you tell I've considered making one from scratch?



Xylotex used to be the cheapest source for new steppers. They are still $45 each for the 269 oz in. as well as the 425 oz in. They sell some controller and stepper combo kits for about $300. 4 axis drive with 4 steppers for $350. It was circa 2006 when I bought their kit for my Taig, so there are probably better kit options, or of course go with Gecko drivers or the like and built your own controller box.

Sherline's products are mostly too darn tiny, but they have a pretty compelling 4th axis unit (rotary table) for $320. They claim it's quite accurate, but the unit cannot be used with flood coolant.



For windows based controller software, which controls the mill via computer, I'd go with flashcutCNC or mach3, although Mach4 should be out sometime soon. Hopefully it's much improved over mach 3. I already have a Mach3 license; it used to only be $60 but now it's $175. I don't know how much FlashCutCNC software costs but I know you need a hardware decoder so it probably is quite a bit more costly than Mach. EMC2 is another controller option which runs on Linux.