Any Experience With 6040 Cnc Router Kit?

J

j ferguson

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This is a typical ad for a kit for the mechanical parts for a small gantry router:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USA-free-Sh...357345?hash=item3d1a117761:g:WMoAAOSweW5Ve56z

I have a Sherline 2000 with which I'm delighted, but it doesn't have the spindle speed nor the table travel to really do what I need for a particular application, cutting model airplane parts from balsa sheet. Balsa is sold in 4 x30 or 4x36 sheets which are close enough to capacity of a 6040 and of course the load on the spindle would be very low - don't need high production rate. I could buy the ball screws, the linear rails, and the extrusions and make my own, more or less from scratch in which case I could get a little more length, but since this thing looks pretty substantial and the price doesn't seem to me to be crazy should I just buy the kit and fix the things I turn out not to like?

If you've bought one of these kits, what do you think? If you haven't can you point out any errors in my thinking?

john
 
Hi John,

I have collected all the parts for a 36"x48" router and have spent about $2500 total. The model you referenced looks like a decent place to start and I am not sure you could get all of the parts separately for any less. You would still need stepper motors/controls, a spindle, estop, cable management... Good luck!
 
Hi brav65,

i already have the stepper controller which I built for the Sherline which also uses NEMA 23 Steppers. I built it with standard microphone type connectors so I could use it for other projects -- like this one. I suppose I may regret not building a bigger one later on, but for now cutting the balsa will be more than enough. I'm thinking of an air-cooled 400 watt spindle, the speed controller, the steppers, another instance of LinuxCNC for driving it, and a software program named SheetCAM which among other things automatically adds tabs to the parts so they don't get completely cut out when you make them.

best,

john
 
It looks like a reasonable kit. I built something similar for a customer, I think it was about $3000 delivered with motors and power supply. Had to do a little fitting and and filing to get it together, but everything worked.
 
I ended up buying one - complete. It cost $1499 on Ebay, and included an .8kw 65mm diameter spindle and an SXCNC controller which had the VFD built-in. There are apparently two main variations of this 6040 design on Ebay right now. The less expensive version uses a different controller and it looked to me like the aluminum is painted - maybe not anodized. It doesn't look like this one is anodized but it is "hell for stout". I am delighted.

It uses a parallel interface which was fine for me - so does the controller i built for my sherline 2000.

My 6040 was shipped from the West Coast and arrived 4 days early. It was packed in a large cardboard box and surrounded with dozens of chunks of styrofoam. Controller was in a box inside, 4th axis (stepper and small chuck), pump, tools and yes, some cutters and two collets were included. Based on advice from other buyers of these things, i checked tightness of all connections - everything was really snug, maybe more than I would have done. I also opened up the SXCNC controller. Wiring was tidy, and sound. There was a problem though. The holes for mounting the muffin fan were not spaced out quite enough and the assembler had just bulled his way through and in so doing had warped the fan enough so the blades hit the housing. I drilled the holes out bigger and now it works fine.

I installed steppers, hooked up cables switched X axis and Y axis so it would work like my mill, set up LinuxCNC to work with it and Voila. Everything works. I also greased rails and ball-screws with PTFE.

I downloaded the VFD manual and checked the settings - all correct although i think i may set minimum HZ to enough to keep spindle up to a reasonable speed. I have to decide whether I want spindle control and speed reporting on my computer screen.

Installed pump on top of homedepot 5 gallon bucket - it isn't as loud as I expected, but works fine.

I wouldn't hesitate to buy another one of these things from this source, but when I let them know that they needed to look at the fan installation, I got request from likely Chinese person asking for a video of problem - she seemed to have no idea what I had referred to. And while we are at it, are Chinese people as polite to each other as she was to me? ie. Dear Friend?

I bought the $59 harbor freight tool cart and a piece of 3/4 plywood to install this thing on. the tool cart is very stout and you can mount a top on it by laying some 2x4s in it and screwing the top to the 2x4s. Amazingly, the sides of the top of the cart are just short of 3 1/2 inches on the inside so the top of a 2x4 will be just above the edge making it really easy for the top to be bigger than the top tray.

I'm going to use this to cut balsa for model airplanes. I bought SheetCam, 2 1/2d cam product which can combine dxf files and lets you manually nest profiles (ribs and formers) then produce the G-Code to run the router using LinuxCNC -or (Mach3 which came with router - but I run Linux so no joy there). A very useful feature of SheetCam is tabbing. You can tell it to leave the cutouts connected by tabs so that they don't come loose and get eaten up by the cutter. this also means i can cut with a 1/16th bit and since the parts stay in place, the stock sheet is much more likely to stick to a vacuum table through the entire run.

Vacuum table will be mdf made by me, which is where I came to one of the fun parts. To get some idea of what speed I might cut mdf with a 1/4 inch bit, I tried some runs at various feeds and DOC using the manual control on LinuxCNC. I was astounded by the amount of dust these things make, mucho.

So I bought a slick little shop vac from HomeDepot which fits on top of one of their 5 gallon buckets. I made a Dust-Shoe for the spindle out of HDPE and used the brushes from two HomeDepot brush nozzles. They have metal (not steel but ???) bases which were difficult to reform to fit the groove I made in the shoe. But i prevailed - just don't look too closely.

Now I have to figure out how I'm going to zero the work. Maybe get the work zeroed, then retract spindle to get enough room to install the dust-shoe, do it, then cut.

more to follow.

If this isn't the right place for this post, it would be fine with me if it were moved.

John
 
John: Make yourself an offset pointer for the router mount. Use something like a long trammel point and leave the mount permanently attached. Jog the x and y axis close to the zero point, drop in the point and move it to exact zero. Set it, pull the point and start making sawdust.
 
Zero is whatever you make of it. Thanks CV, it's a good idea, although I'm warming up to put limit switches on. there certainly isn't any lack of room for them.


best,

john
 
Something to consider John: Limit switches for zero position are going to drive you bonkers, as the positional accuracy and repeatability are going to be horrible. I've seen switches out of the same production batch have as much as .125" difference in activation points. If they are lever switches, the inertia at contact can easily cause levers to be bent, or brackets to be displaced, and at that point your zero is gone. You are way better off to have an alignment point inside the limit switches and use that as your defined zero within the software.
 
Here is the way I did the limit switches for a router. I built these 15° ramp actuators. Repeatability was very good. It's better if you use slow acting (as opposed to snap action) limit switches, they are more repeatable but a bit harder to find unless you go to industrial limit switches. The switch shown in the second picture is a snap action. If I would have needed extreme accuracy, slow acting switches would have been installed. A couple of other good options are inductive proximity sensors or fork type photo eyes that are actuated by a tab.
upload_2016-8-20_10-4-30.png



upload_2016-8-20_10-4-5.png
 
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