My Latest Money Pit Idea - Scratch Build A 3 Axis Cnc Mill

coolidge

coolidge

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A huge undertaking no doubt but certainly would be an extremely rewarding endeavor. I have seen some jaw dropping scratch built mills and lathes on youtube, go for it!!!
 
I'll be looking forward to the build pictures. Should be interesting. As Eddy says, go for it! A Cat40 spindle/head should be pretty easy to find.
 
Thanks Eddy, I'm not too proud to borrow and draw inspiration from others I'll have to take a look on youtube. Here are some gut shots of a Haas mini mill.

In this first pic you see the belt driven spindle, the head doesn't look all that beefy really and the table is rather small.



Now the column, yeah there's some serious beef there.



Here you see the stand is just welded steel. I can weld and I happen to know a guy with a 4x8 foot CNC plasma cutter.



Here's a side view. I don't have my own cast iron foundry so I'd have to fabricate the column, base, and saddle from steel.
 
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Humm "mini-mill" do hass use google translate to decide on machine names ? :)

Stuart
 
There was a fellow here a while back that was building a CNC Mill from scratch, He cast the base and column out of an "Epoxycrete" mixture, it had steel inserts cast in place for attaching the linear bearings. It looked like it was off to a good start, but then he seemed to stop posting? I tried looking up the thread but the search engine on this site is so crappy, I couldn't find it... Anyway, it looked like an interesting approach to producing a very rigid structure for a machine tool.
 
There's no price Jim, since its our WA state craigslist I'm going to guess $1.3 million /sarcasm
 
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