Thread: Home Built, router mill

My son and i lost a General Contracting business in the Florida housing crash and we had to go looking for a new source of income. He went into making Silver parts and kits for pen turners and i went into woodworking. He had a small Sherline lath from a jewelry business that he had previously. That limited what we could do so we moved up to a taig and then to a milling machine and then to a CNC set up for the Taig. That became to small so we decided to build a larger mill. We had a bunch of parts on hand and bought the motors, controllers, etc off EBay. We have a 1 HP router motor that drives a dry spindle at 8.000 or 12,000RPM with an 8" vertical travel. The table can cut 8 1/2" x 20". The controller has smooth steppers in it and we had trouble with the program dropping out in the middle of the run. We have it set up on a powered USB port and could not get it to run until we put a ground wire between the computer and the controller. Now everything works the way we hoped for.
The repeatable accuracy of the machine is just amazing to to this old man. I was cutting a custom piece of straight molding for a friend and the bit was cutting .4 mm from the edge of the board. It cut that sliver of wood in 3mm passes for a depth of about 30mm with out cutting it off.
My son uses .3 mm ball mill bits in his Silver Pen Parts work to carve custom designs in the center bands and clips. i don't have any pictures in this computer to show off how fine the control is on this machine.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_e...Q/IMG_1912.JPG
another
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/_e...A/IMG_1911.JPG
and another
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_e...4/IMG_1917.JPG

Regards
Joe