William's Workbench

I was playing with my CNC tonight and came up with this:

The text is the demo g-code that comes with EMC Axis and was engraved using a 0.5″ 90 degree v-bit. I hand calculated the offsets and wrote some simple g-code to cut out the text from a large scrap of MDF. The bottom edge looks pretty rough because I needed to fine tune the feed rate. Initially I had the feed set at 30 ipm (inches per minute) but this was too fast for my el-cheapo 2 flute up spiral bit. 10 ipm worked much better but still chattered a bit. Each pass was taking off 0.25″ and that might have been too aggressive.

These images show that the CNC is fairly accurate and precise, at least good enough to make nice 0.75″ text.

I still have no good CAD/CAM software stack but at least I am making chips.

Slowly but surely this project is nearing completion. This weekend I assembled the base and gantry. The remaining electronics and stepper motors have shipped and should arrive this week. There is still a lot of minor assembly and tweaking to be done but it is finally starting to look complete. My good camera was low on battery so I only have grainy phone pictures to share.