Hi, some advice please. I have a fair bit of experience building 3D printers form scratch ( no kits, look at avatar) but CNC is a very different animal. My desire is to construct as much of the machine myself from tools available to me the goal is not much to keep the cost down as to build a CNC machine inhouse. when I built my 1st 3D printer I had no access to a 3D printer and as such built it from aluminum and wood, and once printing had it print higher quality parts for itself and upgrade itself. I would like to do something similar for the CNC machine. I will build a lightweight machine capable of not much more than cutting parts to build a higher strength machine or possibly upgrade its own parts to higher accuracy parts. Again its not about the quickest way to build a machine. I can probably have parts laser cut etc in a fraction of the time for fairly little money. but its not the object. The cutting tool (initially at least) will probably be a dremel type tool and a bed size around A3 page size. Electronics I would like to stick to arduino based electronics as I'm familiar with it but mach3 looks easy enough to figure out. The advice I'm looking for is if there is a similar build to this already or something that could be adapted to suit and in general advice about a project such as this.
Unlike with 3D printing, there's really no need to build the whole cnc machine just to cut the plates to build another machine. All it really takes is a bit of ingenuity to rough cut a set of plates that can be used with the final rail and wheel assemblies to complete a machine sufficient to cut a proper set of plates which can then be easily switched out. I've cut all my preliminary OX plates with just a chop saw and a router sled and drilled them on a small drill press. Most people have done the preliminary plates with Garolite board. I'm using an aluminum skinned composite panel which is fairly rigid and easy to cut. Short of going that route, look up the Routy design. It is a simple system which uses off the shelf plates, something which you can recycle later into other projects if desired.
