Table all painted and ready for motors & electricals - eastern Iowa, US

[jeffa]

Hello to all,

By way of introduction, my name is Jeff and I live in Eastern Iowa, USA. I found this site a couple of weeks ago and I can't believe what a great community of people have come together here. I have been interested in CNC machining for some time and I think now the bug has really bitten me.

I am employed with a plastics manufacturing company and I started and ran, for a number of years, our company's Machinery Development group. I have since moved on to other, more administrative responsibilities, but in my heart, I really love machinery and manufacturing and doing things with machinery.

A few years ago we purchased a couple of CNC routing machines from a company called CNT Motion. They were pretty good servo routing machines and a good value I think. However, after seeing and working with these machines for awhile, my primary thought was that we could build these machines ourselves. But, we never did and I have always had a desire to build one. So, I thought, why not build one for myself to put in my shop at home. Now, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it once I get it done, but I know there will be some great, fun projects...

Also, my son Erick, who is 16 years old, has also joined this site. He has shown some interest in Engineering as a career and he and I have agreed to work on this project together. I would really love to be able to expose him to and help him learn the many skills that are needed to build a nice CNC machine such as the MechMate.

So, for us, the journey has begun. We are thinking that we will build a 1250mm X 1250mm machine. With the added 50mm in both the X and Y axis, we should cover 48" X 48" material pretty effectively and the machine won't take up too much room in my already crowded shop.

As we move forward I will start a build thread to share our experience with the rest of the community here.

So for now, hello again from Jeff and Erick!

[Gerald D]

Welcome Jeff & Erick!

Erick, don't be shy to get your own username and post here independently - you might have to finish the machine all by yourself. :)

Be careful of adding 50mm in all directions....I have already done that on the design.

[jeffa]

Thanks Gerald,

What a wonderful job you have done here.

I think Erick has already gotten his own user name and hopefully he won't be too shy to post his comments and questions.

With regard to the machine size, if we build to 1250 X 1250 we should end up with 1300 X 1300 based on your included 50mm? Am I understanding correctly?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Gerald D]

If you choose your X and Y dimensions on the drawings as 1250 x 1250, the center of the router will be able to move a distance of 1350mm, going 50mm beyond each edge of the 1250.

[jeffa]

Gerald,

Okay, I get it now. I'm just a little slow sometimes :confused:. So you design adds 100mm to the chosen X and Y dimensions?

Thanks again,

Jeff

[Gerald D]

Yes, I add 100mm of movement to the chosen X & Y.

In an extreme case, you might have a 100mm diameter "cutter", and then you will only just be able to run that "cutter" around the edge of the table.

[jeffa]

Gerald,

Sorry to be such a pest this early in my membership, but I am wondering if we want a little more Z, i.e. using the 350mm Z travel design, what height of Main Longitudnal Beam would you recommend?

Thanks,

Jeff

[domino11]

Jeff,
Welcome to the forum. The original design uses 6" beams, but you could use an 8" beam to gain more clearance along with the 14" Z option.

[Marc Shlaes]

Jeff,

Welcome.

Where are you in eastern Iowa? I am from Moline, IL and I will probably be there for Christmas. Not totally sure yet. If you are close to Moline, we could possibly hook up for a chat. Let me know.

Regards,

Marc

[Gerald D]

See the note at the bottom right of the first drawing 10 00 000 A B.

"Add 150mm [6"] for 10 40 014 A Z-slide (increases flex, reduces cut quality)"

ie. you would need 300mm [12"] beams to fully use the 350mm [14"] stroke, at the expense of increased flex and reduced cut quality. However, you could use tall beams and a removable "table box" lying on the table to raise boards up nearer to the gantry.

[jeffa]

Marc,

We live just a little North of Clinton, Iowa. Probably about 50 minutes North of Moline.

Thanks,

Jeff

[jeffa]

Gerald,

I think we've desided to build a table with an X axis of 1850mm and a Y axis of 1250mm. I also think we'll use an 8" Main Beam height and the 14" Z axis. Getting some materials on order now.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Lex]

Welcome Jeff & Erick,
Shy person myself!:p Draughtsmen are very sensitive to critisism. On this forum it is always constructive and helpful. Here i useally only felt hurt for vyf minutes after.:):D
So please ask.

[jeffa]

Thanks Lex,

Shopping for these kinds of Christmas presents is as fun as it gets. However, my MasterCard is now suffering a little :eek:.


Regards,

Jeff

[jeffa]

All,

Well, first the easy part. Here's Erick with his first task...print out all of the drawings, 3-hole punch them and put them in a binder so we can try to keep things straight...wishful thinking I know...

Best regards,

Jeff

[jeffa]

All,

Here are our first parts starting to arrive care of Mr. Mclain. What a nice job on these laser cut and bent parts. Joe, you made this part way too easy.

Joe, thanks for all you help, great quality parts and super quick service.

Best regards,

Jeff

[jeffa]

All,

Well, the motors arrived today from Oriental Motor. We purchased the PK296A2A-SG7.2. We thought we'd better open up the laser cut parts and the motors and lay everything out. I turned on the heat in the shop tonight so hopefully we'll be able to start working tomorrow night.

We got hit with 5" of snow today and we're suppose to get some freezing rain tomorrow. I'm trying to remember why I live in Iowa...:confused:

Best regards,

Jeff

[Kobus_Joubert]

Good luck with the build. This looks like another top notch MM in the making. Very nice clean workshop.

[jeffa]

All,

We received our steel order earlier in the week. You may notice I ordered rectangular tube instead of round tube for the base cross braces and angle braces.

Best Regards,

Jeff and Erick

[jeffa]

All,

Here's a good Saturday project.

We were able to get most all of the steel cut to size today.

Erick is now an expert cold saw operator.

Regards,

Jeff and Erick

[jeffa]

Well, we had a nice surprise today after we got our steel parts unloaded.

The 203V drives arrived today from Geckodrive.

Regards,

Jeff

[sailfl]

Jeff / Erick

Very nice start and lots of pictures.... we like pictures and we like people building or cutting.

Enjoy

[domino11]

Jeff and Erick,
Looking good. That sure is a nice looking shop you have there. :)

[javeria]

Jeff and Eric - the pics look soooo good.

and you guys are progressing so fast - looks like I am limping :(

best of luck :)

RGDS
Irfan

[jeffa]

Heath,

Thanks, the first couple of shots with the laser cut parts and the motors are in our shop. We cut the steel to length using the shop and saw which belongs to the company for whom I work.

Thanks,

Jeff

[jeffa]

All,

It's back to work tomorrow after a long holiday weekend. Here's wishing everyone a happy New Year.

We drilled and drilled and drilled this weekend. After spending enough time on the drill press, I decided to clean off my welding bench (long overdue) and start some of the welding. Just to get warmed up after a long time away from the welder, I started on the legs, welding the 1/4" plates to the bottom of each leg. Next I got ready to weld the Y-car. That will be tomorrow night's project.

Here are a few more pics...

Regards,

Jeff & Erick

[lunaj76]

Looking good guys! Are the red jigs also magnetic?

[Kobus_Joubert]

As long as that is the only red color on the machine..;). good going. :D

[jeffa]

Justin,

Yes, the red jigs you see are magnetic welding squares. I think you can get them anywhere welding supplys are sold. I bought this pair at Harbor Freight. Like everything there, they were really inexpensive and they worked really well for welding the Y-car last night. :D

Thanks,

Jeff & Erick

[jeffa]

Kobus,

The 'red' is all gone already (I picked-up a few cans of blue yesterday). We welded the Y-car assembly last night. I have never worked with laser cut and bent parts before. The design is really great (thanks again Gerald). The parts snapped together perfectly and the welded assembly method went really well. I'll post some more pictures soon. We will begin work on the X-gantry tonight.

Regards,

Jeff & Erick

[Gerald D]

Jeff & Erick, what you experienced with the laser cut parts snapping together is the power of CNC cutting. Realise that one day you are going to make wood parts that just snap together . . . . . . :)

[Gerald D]

Psst, Erick; your old man has put lots of pics of you up here - can you put a pic of him over here (http://www.mechmate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=577)? :D

[jeffa]

The MechMate in eastern Iowa continues to move forward. I know we owe the forum some updated pictures. This will follow in the next few days.

Here are some pictures of the 350 mm 'Z' slide...

Regards,

Jeff

[jeffa]

As you can see, we used the V-rail on the 'Z' slide also. In doing so, the "tip" of the "V" is moved .188" higher on the assembly. This causes a pretty tight fit between the rectangular tube on the 'Z' slide and the inside of the spider.

Regards,

Jeff

[jeffa]

To regain Gerald's original design clearance between the 'Z' slide tube and the inside of the spider, we remade the 6 Bearing Support Bases to a height of .625" instead of the 11mm (.433") shown on drawing M1 20 220 T B. This seemed like a good solution and looks to have worked out well. :)

Regards,

Jeff

[HomeMadeCnc]

Thanks for the updates and great pictures. This is my next assembly to tackle.
Keep up the great work,
Tim

[domino11]

Jeff your solution to the interference problem looks interesting. :) Some nice progress there!

[lunaj76]

Great pics and progress!

[Gerald D]

Thanks for the feedback Jeff & Erick

I was wondering on the weekend how you guys were getting along.

Looks like the V-rail on the z-slide is becoming popular. Sometimes the rail on the front, sometimes on the back. Maybe I need to make a set of drawings for that option . . . But, as you found, fiddling with the height of the support bases makes it all work out.

[sailfl]

Jeff and Erick

Those pictures of all the V Rails and the button screws bring back memories. Lots of drilling and taping. It makes a heart feel good to see copies.

Good work. Your build is looking good. It won't be long before you will have a breathing, wood eating machine.

[jeffa]

Hello again to all.

It's been a while since we've posted on the MechMate Forum. We had a very busy spring this year so unfortunately, we were not able to make too much progress on our machine.:(

However, we worked on it every now and then, when we could. Also, I've continued to lurk around the forum almost every day to get my MechMate fix... Finally, it got to be too much for me and I had to make another push to move closer to completion.

Here are some photo updates of our progress...


The 'Z' axis moves smoothly through all three sets of V-rollers...

[jeffa]

We were able to get the base frame welded and the V-rails bolted to the aluminum angle. I still need to spend some time getting all of the axis to roll flat relative to the plane of the base table cross members...it's pretty good, but I think with a little more tweeking, I'll be able to get it almost perfect.

We also got the supports for the cable chain welded and attached. And, as you can see, we also got the cable chains fitted.

[jeffa]

We will be mounting the electrical cabinet on vibration isolating mounts. Here are a couple of photos showing this scheme...

And one photo of the electrical cabinet mounted in position.

[jeffa]

Just a few last items to finish up and the machanical build will be done.

With any luck and a little more time this weekend, I should be able to get the proximity sensor mounts done and the 'X' axis racks mounted (we already have these welded up to length...we just need to drill a hole in the ends of both racks).

[domino11]

Looks like pretty good progress to me! Well done guys! :)

[jeffa]

Everything fit together so well and all axis roll as smooth as butter. A few more hours and we should have the mechanical build done and we can put some blue paint on her...(which will be really good since, as you can see from some of our photos, it's starting to rust a bit).:o

It's been great getting back into our build!

I was able to purchase an almost new 5 HP HSD ATC spindle off of eBay and I just ordered and received a Delta VFD from the guys at PDS.

Almost time to start the really fun part....:D

Thanks,

Jeff

[Gerald D]

Beautiful stuff, Jeff & Erick! Nice to hear from you again. :)

[jeffa]

Thanks Gerald,

It's nice to be making some forward progress and contributing to the forums again. It sure helps to have the helpful community here to keep us going. Hopefully we'll be able to have our Mechmate moving under it's own power before too long.:rolleyes:

Best regards,

Jeff

[jeffa]

Started to disassemble our machine today to begin the painting process.

I thought I would get a shot of one of the tops of our 'X' axis rail beams. I used a very straight piece of bar stock along with some mark-up paste (blue steel ink), a belt sander and a couple of good squares to bring the tops very close to "true" for the mounting of our 'X' axis rails. We may have to shim a bit, but I hope it is minimal.

This may not have been a necessary step, but I couldn't help it...just my nature I guess...;)

Jeff

[jeffa]

We started to paint some of the machine components today.

One benefit from building your own MechMate that I've never heard mentioned in the Forum is that if you do things just right, you'll have a pair of shoes to match your new CNC router. :)

Best regards,

Jeff

[Gerald D]

Elvis and his blue suede shoes?

[jeffa]

Well, at last, a long over due update...and confession...

You may recall from one of our last posts that we were in the process of trying to "tune" our X axis rails and their mounting surfaces in an effort to make the Y axis gantry roll very flat relative to the base table cross members. We were able to get it very close (within about + or - .015" over all areas of the base table cross members). However, no matter how much we tried, we could not get it any closer. :confused:

That's when I realized that a "short cut" we (I) had taken on the aluminum rails had come back to bite us in the butt. Because the square-inside-cornered aluminum angle was not as readily available, I purchased aluminum angle (6061 T6) with the radius in the inside corner and I tried to nibble out the radius corner to a square corner with the table saw. Bad idea... This caused the mounting surface for our V-rails to float up and down and created a rail height that was all over the place. Our Y axis rail were able to be salvaged. They are short enough that we were able to mill out the inside corner and remount the V-rails.

Here's a photo of one of our Y axis rails after it was fixed...

[jeffa]

Our X axis rails were unable to be salvaged so I ordered the correct aluminum angle this time (I know, I shouldn't have deviated from the plan) and a new set of V-rails. :rolleyes:

Here we're tapping the new set of V-rails

[smreish]

....ooohhhhh I want a tapping head like that! I had one...then it went missing!
Very nice work. I am watching intently. Only a choice few have the alum rail base and preground rails on top. Good luck!

[jeffa]

Here are a couple of photos of the process we used to set the height of our X and Y axis rails.

First, we bolted our V-rail to our aluminum angle and placed a clamp between each bolt location.

Next, we tightened each mounting bolt and then measured the height of the rail between each mounting bolt.

After determining what the best natural height should be, we adjusted the V-rail up or down by filing a bit or lifting a bit to set both sets of rails to the same height. We were able to set the rail heights to within + or - .0005" along the entire length of each set.

[jeffa]

Both sets of rails are much, much better now. :rolleyes:

We are spraying each with clear-coat (no paint on the roller or gear surfaces) and we hope to begin final assembly tomorrow and over the weekend. We have many of our electrical components and we hope to begin laying out our electrical cabinet very soon.

Until our next update (which we hope will be sooner than our last)...

Best regards,

Jeff and Erick

[jeffa]

....ooohhhhh I want a tapping head like that! I had one...then it went missing!
Very nice work. I am watching intently. Only a choice few have the alum rail base and preground rails on top. Good luck!

Sean,

The tapping head in the photo is just a cheap-o unit from Harbor Freight, but it works quite nicely.

Jeff

[Claudiu]

Professional looking machine...really nice job.

[Gerald D]

I will just repeat what I said 6 months ago: :D

Beautiful stuff, Jeff & Erick! Nice to hear from you again. :)

[jehayes]

Looking very good Jeff: Nice work

[jeffa]

Thank you all for the nice comments of encouragement. It is very much appreciated. :)

Regards,

Jeff and Erick

[jeffa]

Our machine is just about assembled. We plan to drill and mount the first table-bed board tomorrow.

Last week we received some computer components which I had ordered, so we threw together this nice little embedded computer. We plan to mount this little guy inside of our control cabinet.

We loaded the operating system and Mach 3 today. Also included in the photo is the 17" ELO touch screen which we purchased off of eBay for cheap.

That's all for now...:)

Best Regards,

Jeff and Erick

[Robert M]

Hi Jeff,
Could I ask you to tell me more on the computer components?
Some detail on what are they and where you got them, nice little compact assembly that I’m interested in and wood like to look in to !
Thanks in advance, Robret ;)

[jeffa]

Robert,

Happy to provide the information.:) We ordered this computer from Logic Supply, Inc. ( www.logicsupply.com ). Here's the list:

* Intel D945GSEJT Johnstown - Fanless Mainboard;
* M350 Universal Mini-ITX case with Mounting Brackets and DIN rail mounts (I'm not sure yet how we will mount the control computer in our cabinet, so I purchased both, they're cheap);
* M350 Backplate and PCI Riser for D945GSEJT Mainboard;
* 2GB DDR2 667 SO-DIMM Memory;
* 160GB 2.5" Seagate SATA HDD 5400rpm (3Gb/sec);
* 80W, 12V AC Power Adapter (brick).

With delivery to our house $334.95 USD.

We are planning to use the SmoothStepper, but this setup also has an onboard LPT Parallel Port header and with the PCI Riser you could add a second if needed.

Jeff

[JDFarmBoy]

Your machine looks great, hope you get it cutting before long. I live west of Dewitt, glad to see someone close by building the Mechmate. I hope to start mine in the next few months.

[Robert M]

Great Jeff…. Appreciate V-much.
Amicalement, Robert ;)