zhuying1317

NC milling tools are just sth different. Once you have one, a lot of things that you have been used to will no longer be tolerated. It can be used on almost anything. I use mine on wood, copper, aluminium, steel, leather, carbon fiber, everything. Keeping the hand wheel is an important thing, quite useful in some occasions.

The first question is, what are you planning to do with this CNC machine, and then how much will you be pleased to pay for the conversion. In my opinion, 4 axis engraving is utterly useful in ship making, so adding a forth axle is highly recommended. It wont cost you much if you dont ask for too much accuracy and robustness, I think ive seen kits down to 60 dollars on taobao. If you are not currently planning for using the 4th axle, at least buy a controller that supports it, so later you wont have to change the whole set when you need it. The controlling system I personally prefer PC-MACH3 system, using USB control board or serial port. But be ware, serial port is hard to find on current PCs. Industrial-level CNC systems are way too strong for personal usage, and it consumes so much budget that you can use that money to upgrade all your steppers to servo motors. SCP based systems, like Arduino systems, are too cheap for a decent milling machine, it lacks a lot of functions, and not accurate on circles. Are steppers good enough for normal CNCs? Yes. But if you have the budget to use servo motors, please do, it is so much human-friendlier than steppers, make your working place a better place for human beings, and provide better accuracy for the machine. "Close circut steppers" are simply junk, they work as loud and vibrate as steppers, but even more fragile than a servo motor. You may want to change all the screw bars to ball-screw shaft for less friction and less backlash. The latter is very important in transforming machinetools. The rails, if you were using dovetail guide or other means of heavy guides like normal milling machines, you can try "Plastic-adapting"the rails(Im not quite sure on how this spells in english). By sticking a PTFE "tape" kind of thing to the rail, it can highly reduce the friction and thus the driving power, so as to make the machine faster, more stable, quieter, and accurater. Finally, you can consider using a second spindle for engraving. One can get a 30K rpm water cooling engraving spindle for like 200 dollars. If you are more dealing with wood, a faster spindle can offer a much less cut-per-rotate, thus protects the wood structure.