Hello, All,
For the sake of voting, I assumed that "Yes" choice #1 meant "yes", and "Yes" choice #2 meant "no". We might adopt that until John has a chance to change the post.
*Note: for reasons that I can't explain, Groups swapped my 2nd and 3rd photos with my 4th and 5th photos. Yet if I go in to edit, they are in the correct positions. Sorry for any confusion.
About a year ago, I purchased a Grizzly ShopFox M1116 mill. While my original Real Bull mill had produced a great deal of good work, (mostly in spite of me, not because of me!), I had decided that I wanted the following improvements from the Real Bull.
- a quill
- tapered gibs on all axes
- a lead screw rather than rack and pinion for the Z-axis
- a fixed column for more rigidity and less tramming
- DROs already installed
This is the M1116 after I uncrated it in my garage, transported the various main modules through my house and down into my basement, (no outdoor entrance to the cellar), then reassembled, mounted and positioned it with the help of my son-in-law and an engine crane.
I quickly grew tired of cranking the X-axis back and forth manually while machining, so I added a power feed with mechanical advice from John (his mill is similar to mine) and programming from Richard Edwards in the UK. Since I knew from my sore arm that I would quickly want to power the Z-axis, I built the control box to handle both the X-axis and Z-axis. The mechanical mod for the X-axis involved removing the X-table end plate, removing most of the boss to expose the lead screw end and adding threaded mounting holes for the motor plate, making a plate to hold the motor and spacers to mount the plate, and mounting and aligning the motor and coupling. For those interested, the stepper is a NEMA 23 motor with 3.0 Nm holding torque. It has proven to be quite adequate. I built the simple control box next and used JBWeld to affix a bracket to the motor and the control box to the bracket.
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Then it was on to the electronics. Richard's design was based on an Arduino Nano, but was intended for one axis. He kindly modified it for me to handle two axes. I fit the power supply, two DM556T stepper motor drivers, the Nano, and all the other goodies to make it work into a housing. I worked in the thermal printer industry for many years, and an ongoing problem was grit getting into the mechanisms in less than pristine environments. So I have gotten into the habit of pressurizing the inside of electronic housings so that air is always flowing out, minimizing the chance of particles getting in. That's why the cooling fan is on the bottom. The clear plastic hood on the front is an air vent flow director, available from any hardware store. It blows the exhausted cooling air down, again to minimize particle entry. The finished X-axis implementation is shown below. The wire loop on top is just to block the openings for the not-yet-installed Z-axis control.
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At about this time, I realized that, once the Z-axis power feed was installed, I had 2/3 of the hardware mods needed to implement a CNC system! I will document the? implement the Z-axis in a following post.?
I hope this is of interest, and would be happy to provide any details or answer any questions.
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Regards,
Charlie
New Jersey, USA
SATTINGER’S LAW: It works better if you plug it in.
EDWARD'S LAW: It works even better if you turn it on.
