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TWEAKIE my CNC machine under construction. |
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CNC is only limited by our imagination. |
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Tweakie |
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CNC Home. |
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After browsing many websites in search of CNC machines and their construction it soon became apparent that every machine I saw had been constructed quite differently. My conclusion to this, is that we all build within our range of skills and use the materials that we already have to hand or which are readily obtainable. My CNC machine falls into this category exactly - It is probably the best I can achieve within my abilities and with the materials I can obtain. For my construction, I chose to make a welded steel frame using fully supported linear rails and ball screws for the X and Y axis with round linear rails and a trapezoid lead screw being used for the Z axis, all direct driven with bi-polar stepper motors. My exploits into the world of CNC have been and still are great fun and as a hobby it can be extremely rewarding, I recommend it to anyone seeking a challenge. Actually building the machine and connecting it to the computer I have found relatively easy compared with organizing the multitude of software necessary to make it all work. The backbone of this software is undoubtedly 'Mach 3' by Artsoft. It is surprisingly easy to learn to use despite its initial daunting appearance (there are, however, still many things I don't yet understand about it but I an getting there, I think). Artsoft allow you to use a free (limited) version of their software to evaluate the product and you don't have to buy until you are certain that it will do the job. Lots of free software is available for CNC followers like me and much of it is extremely useful, such as 'Target2GCode' by Martin De Roode of Majosoft.com This little gem will convert HPGL plotter files into GCode machine files effortlessly. Another by Martin is 'Bmp2Din', this creates the code to produce 3D images from suitably shaded bitmaps. In fact 'Majosoft's Hobby Site' together with 'Hobby CNC Hungary' could occupy a week's internet browsing alone. Another free software is 'G-Simple' by Sotiris Kontogiannis of Polaris Engineering SA. G-Simple was used to produce the GCode for the CNC Cube shown in Pics 33 & 34. Tweakie will never really ever be finished, there will always be improvements to be made and new ideas to be incorporated. With regard to cost, well you should never put a price on your hobby, but I think it would be cheaper to buy a ready built machine than ever to build your own, but just think of all the fun you would be missing out on. The following pages are intended to give some insight into it's construction and show the diversity of tasks that can be performed. Cooperman. |
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Mach 3 |
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Last Update - 10 July 2008. |
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Congratulations to Koen en Esmeralda Kimkes on the birth of their baby son Sven Edgar Hoerar ! Een zoon ! - Geboren op: 3 juni 2008 om 10.17 uur. |