Collaborate Disseminate
Most 3D printers use leadscrews for at least one axis. These are simple devices that are essentially a steel screw thread and a brass nut that travels on it. However, for maximum precision, you’d like to use a ball screw. …read more
It’s a fact of life for CNC router owners — swarf. Whether it’s the fine dust from a sheet of MDF or nice fat chips from a piece of aluminum, the debris your tool creates gets everywhere. You can try to control it at its source, but swarf always finds …read more
Continue reading Plastic Strips Protect Ball Screws on This Homebrew CNC Router
If you’re going to do it yourself, you might as well outdo yourself. That seems to be the thinking behind this scratch-built CNC mill, and it’s only just getting started.
According to [Kris Temmerman], the build will cost about $10,000 by the time he’s done. So it’s not cheap, and …read more
Continue reading Steel Tubes and Ground Plates Form the Skeleton of This DIY Vertical CNC Mill
Translating rotary motion to linear motion is a basic part of mechatronic design. Take a look at the nearest 3D-printer or CNC router — at least the Cartesian variety — and you’ll see some mechanism that converts the rotation of the the motor shafts into the smooth linear motion needed for each axis.
Hobby-grade machines are as likely as not to use pulleys and timing belts to achieve this translation, and that generally meets the needs of the machine. But in some machines, the stretchiness of a belt won’t cut it, and the designer may turn to some variety of …read more
Breaking into the world of auto racing is easy. Step 1: Buy an expensive car. Step 2: Learn how to drive it without crashing. If you’re stuck at step 1, and things aren’t looking great for step 2 either, you might want to consider going with a virtual Porsche or Ferrari and spending your evenings driving virtual laps rather than real ones.
The trouble is, that can get a bit boring after a while, which is what this DIY motion simulator platform is meant to address. In a long series of posts with a load of build details, [pmvcda] goes …read more
Continue reading Homebrew Linear Actuators Put The Moves On This Motion Simulator
There was a time when a two-legged walking robot was the thing to make. But after seeing years of Boston Dynamic’s amazing four-legged one’s, more DIYers are switching to quadrupeds. Now we can add master DIY robot builder [James Bruton] to the list with his openDog project. What’s exciting here is that with [James’] extensive robot-building background, this is more like starting the challenge from the middle rather than the beginning and we should see exciting results sooner rather than later.
Thus far [James] has gone through the planning stage, having iterated through a few versions using Fusion 360, and …read more
Continue reading [James Bruton] Is Making A Dog: OpenDog Project
When it comes to CNC machines, your SureFine has screws on its axes, and the Bodgeport does too. A shopbot has an amazing rack gear system, but when you start to dig into the small CNC routers available for under $2,000, you’ll only find belts moving a router back and forth. This isn’t to say belts won’t work — you can create a fine CNC machine with bits of rubber. However, belts stretch, they wear out, and if you want more precision screws and racks are the way to go.
The WorkBee CNC machine is the first desktop CNC router …read more
Yup, we can hear a crowd full of “not-a-hack” loading their cannons as we speak, but this machine has a special place in the community. For years, the Taig milling machine has remained the go-to micro mill for the light-duty home machine shop. These machines tend to be adorned and hacked to higher standards, possibly because the community that owns these tools tends to enjoy machining for machining’s sake–or possibly because every single component of the mill is available as a replacement part online. For many, this machine has been a starting point to making chips at home. (In fact, …read more
Continue reading Taig Mill Anointed with Ball Screws (at last!)
Most inexpensive 3D printers use a type of lead screw to move some part of the printer in the vertical direction. A motor turns a threaded rod and that causes a nut to go up or down. The printer part rides on the nut. This works well, but it is slower than other drive mechanisms (which is why you don’t often see them on the horizontal parts of a printer). Some cheap printers use common threaded rod, which is convenient, but prone to bad behavior since the rods are not always straight, the threads are subject to backlash, and the …read more
