spindle

21 Articles

The Cheap CNC3018 Gets A Proper Revamp

June 8, 2024 by 24 Comments

Many people have been attracted to the low price and big dreams of the CNC3018 desktop CNC router. If you’re quick, you can pick one up on the usual second-hand sales sites with little wear and tear for a steal. They’re not perfect machines by any stretch of the imagination, but they can be improved upon, and undoubtedly useful so long as you keep your expectations realistic.

[ForOurGood] has set about such an improvement process and documented their journey in a whopping eight-part (so far!) video series. The video linked below is the most recent in the series and is dedicated to creating a brushless spindle motor on a budget.

As you would expect from such a machine, you get exactly what you pay for.  The low cost translates to thinner than ideal metal plates, aluminium where steel would be better, lower-duty linear rails, and wimpy lead screws. The spindle also suffers from cost-cutting, as does the size of the stepper motors. But for the price, all is forgiven. The fact that they can even turn a profit on these machines shows the manufacturing prowess of the Chinese factories.

We covered the CNC 3018 a while back, and the comments of that post are a true gold mine for those wanting to try desktop CNC. Warning, though: It’s a fair bit harder to master than 3D printing!

Continue reading “The Cheap CNC3018 Gets A Proper Revamp” →

Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself

January 23, 2024 by 18 Comments

The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-intensive to make, you’ve got to find ways to reduce your inputs. That sounds like a job for industrial automation, a solution that’s often out of reach of small shops, for all the obvious reasons. Not if you’re clever about things, though, as this fully automated CNC lathe work cell shows.

This build comes to us from the woodshop of [Maher Lagha], where he’s making wooden honey dippers. Wooden dowel blanks are dispensed from an infeed rack and chucked between centers on the headstock and pneumatic tailstock. A two-axis stage in front of the workpiece moves a tool against the spinning stock, carving out the honey dipper in just a few minutes. When the lathe work is done, the spindle stops, the tailstock pulls the honey dipper back off the headstock, and a pneumatic piston unceremoniously whacks the almost-finished part — it looks like it still needs a little manual post-processing — into a bin. Lather, rinse, repeat, profit.

[Maher] doesn’t provide many details, but just looking at the work cell shows a veritable feast of industrial automation equipment. The spindle and tailstock of the lathe sit on a bed made from a massive slab of aluminum extrusion, and the X- and Y-axes use linear rails and ballscrews. And mindful of the effects of wood chips on delicate mechanisms, [Maher] did a good job of containing the mess with a host of acrylic guards.

As we said when we saw [Maher]’s wooden coaster work cell a while back, the wood widget business must be pretty good to justify automation like this. What’s nice with both these rigs is that they look like they could be quickly reprogrammed and retooled to create other products. Pretty impressive.

Continue reading “Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself” →

Adding Two Axes Makes CNC Router More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

July 26, 2023 by 20 Comments

The problem with building automated systems is that it’s hard to look at any problem and not see it in terms of possible automation solutions. Come to think of it, that’s probably less of a bug and more of a feature, but it’s easy to go overboard and automate all the things, which quickly becomes counterproductive in terms of time and money.

If you’re clever, though, a tactical automation solution can increase your process efficiency without breaking the budget. That’s where [Christopher Helmke] seems to have landed with this two-axis add-on fixture for his CNC router. The rig is designed to solve the problem of the manual modification needed to turn off-the-shelf plastic crates into enclosures for his line of modular automation components, aspects of which we’ve featured before. The crates need holes drilled in them and cutouts created in their sides for displays and controls. It’s a job [Christopher] tackled before with a drill and a jigsaw, with predictable results.

To automate the job without going overboard, [Christopher] came up with a tilting turntable that fits under the bed of the CNC router and sticks through a hole in the spoil board. The turntable is a large, 3D printed herringbone gear driven by a stepper and pinion gear. A cheap bearing keeps costs down, while a quartet of planetary gears constrain the otherwise wobbly platform. The turntable also swivels 90 degrees on a herringbone sector gear; together, the setup adds pitch and roll axes to the machine that allow the spindle access to all five sides of the crates.

Was it worth the effort? Judging by the results in the video below, we’d say so, especially given the number of workpieces that [Christopher] has to process. Add in the budget-conscious construction that doesn’t sacrifice precision too much, and this one seems like a real automation win.

Continue reading “Adding Two Axes Makes CNC Router More Than The Sum Of Its Parts” →

Spindle Upgrade Makes PocketNC Faster And Smoother

June 27, 2023 by 21 Comments

Conventional wisdom says that rigidity is the name of the game when it comes to machine tool performance. After all, there’s got to be a reason for CNC machines that need specialized rigging companies just to deliver them. But is there perhaps a way for the hobby machinist to cheat a little on that?

From the look of [Ryan]’s PocketNC spindle upgrade, it seems like the answer just might be yes. The PocketNC, a much-coveted five-axis CNC mill sized for the home shop, has a lot going for it, but as with most things, there are trade-offs. Chief among these is a lack of the usual huge, heavy castings used for CNC machines, which results in the tendency for the cutting tool to chatter or even stall out if you push the speeds and feeds too far. After a good intro to some of the important metrics of machining, such as “material removal rate,” the video below delves into how MRR affects chip load which in turn results in chatter.

The easy fix for chatter, of course, is to take smaller cuts. But [Ryan] decided to increase the spindle speed to take lighter cuts, but to do it really fast. The hardware for this includes a 3,500 KV high-torque brushless DC motor and a custom spindle attachment. The motor is connected to the spindle shaft using pulleys and a drive belt, and the shaft is supported with stout bearings that can be pre-loaded to fight backlash. The end result is three times the stock 10,000 RPM spindle speed, which lets [Ryan] see a 300% increase in cycle time on his PocketNC. And as a bonus, the whole thing requires no permanent modification to the machine and can be easily removed.

We think [Ryan] did a great job breaking this problem down to the essentials and hacking up a low-cost solution to the problem. Continue reading “Spindle Upgrade Makes PocketNC Faster And Smoother” →

Retired Welding Robot Picks Up Side Hustle As CNC Router

April 11, 2023 by 19 Comments

Who says you can’t teach an old robot new tricks? Nobody, actually. That saying is about dogs. But it applies to robots too, at least judging by the way this late-90s industrial beast was put to use in a way it was never intended: as a giant CNC router.

The machine in question is an ABB IRB6400, a six-axis, floor-mounted industrial machine that had a long career welding at a Eurorail factory in Austria before [Brian Brocken] made its acquaintance. He procured the non-working machine — no word on what he paid for it — and moved the 2-ton paperweight into his shop, itself a non-trivial endeavor. After a good scrubbing, [Brian] tried to get the machine started up. An error prevented the robot controller from booting; luckily, there’s a large community of ABB users, and [Brian] learned that one of the modules in the controller needed replacement.

After fixing that — and swapping out the controller’s long-dead backup batteries, plus replacing the original 1.44 MB floppy drive with a USB drive — he was able to bring the machine back to life. Unfortunately, the limited amount of internal memory made it difficult to use for anything complicated, so [Brian] came up with an application to stream coordinates to the controller over a serial port, allowing for unlimited operation. With that in place, plus a simple spindle mounted to the robot’s wrist with a 3D printed adapter, [Brian] was able to carve foam blocks into complex shapes. The video below shows everything from delivery to first chips — well, dust at least.

This build seems to be a significant escalation from [Brian]’s previous large-format CNC machine. He must have something interesting in mind, so stay tuned for details.

Continue reading “Retired Welding Robot Picks Up Side Hustle As CNC Router” →

Testing An Inexpensive CNC Spindle

September 12, 2022 by 22 Comments

The old saying “you get what you pay for” is a cautionary cliché, but is directly contrary to several other common sayings. In the case of [Spikee]’s planned CNC machine build, he took the more adventurous idiom of “no risk, no reward” to heart when he purchased these spindles for the machine from AliExpress. While the delivered product seemed fine, there were some problems that needed investigations.

Upon delivery of the spindle, everything seemed to work correctly out-of-the-box. Even the variable frequency drive, which was programmed at the factory, was working properly. But at around 8000 rpm the machine would begin shaking. The suspected part causing the vibration was the tool holder, so after checking the machine’s runout and also using a specialized vibration sensor this was confirmed to be the case.

Luckily [Spikee] was able to get a refund on the tool holders since they were out of spec, but still has a quite capable spindle on his hands for an excellent price. Without some skills in troubleshooting he might have returned the entire machine unnecessarily. If you are looking for some other ideas in setting up an inexpensive CNC machine, you might also like to look at BLDC motors from a remote control vehicle.

Electronic leadscrew

Electronic Lead Screws – Not Just For Threading Anymore

January 18, 2022 by 6 Comments

An electronic leadscrew is an increasingly popular project for small and mid-sized lathes. They do away with the need to swap gears in and out to achieve the proper ratio between spindle speed and tool carriage translation, and that makes threading a snap. But well-designed electronic leadscrews, like this one from [Hobby Machinist], offer so much more than just easy threading.

The first thing that struck us about this build was the polished, professional look of it. The enclosure for the Nucleo-64 dev board sports a nice TFT display and an IP65-rated keyboard, as well as a beefy-looking jog wheel. The spindle speed is monitored by a 600 pulses-per-revolution optical encoder, and the lathe’s leadscrew is powered by a closed-loop NEMA 24 stepper. This combination allows for the basic threading operations, but the addition of a powered cross slide opens up a ton more functionality. Internal and external tapers are a few keypresses away, as are boring and turning and radius operations, both on the right and on the left. The video below shows radius-cutting operations combined to turn a sphere.

From [Hobby Machinist]’s to-do list, it looks like filleting and grooving will be added someday, as will a G-code parser and controller to make this into a bolt-on CNC controller. Inspiration for the build is said to have come in part from [Clough42]’s electronic leadscrew project from a few years back. Continue reading “Electronic Lead Screws – Not Just For Threading Anymore” →