Wobblycogs Workshop

  • I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading of build logs in the last week and a some tinkering in sketchup to try and improve the design. One of the things that I constantly read people being advised to do…

  • I’ve been adding a bit to the design over the last day or two but I’ve been struggling a little with the diagrams provided by Chai (linearmotionbearings2008 on eBay). They look like scans of scans of badly taken photos and…

  • Now that I’ve redesigned the frame it’s time to start adding bolts to the drawing to find out whether I can actually hold everything together. It might seem a little superfluous to add every single bolt but there’s a couple of good reasons to…

  • No matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise I just wasn’t happy with the design of the frame. Having the legs on the inside of the frame just felt an accident waiting to happen so I bit the…

  • I was reading this build thread yesterday realised I was trying to rush this project and that something was going to go wrong if I didn’t slow down, do a bit more homework and spend longer on the design. I really wanted…

  • After much dithering I decided to go with the 2510 screws and some powerful nema 34 steppers. I’ve not picked the motors and drivers yet but looking at what’s been recommended to me by others I can clearly get something…

  • In an effort to keep the screw length down I moved things around in the design and did a stack of calculations for different screw and motor sizes and then did a bit of pricing up. This spanned a couple…

  • So it turns out that 1500mm is a magic length for home made CNC machines, who could have guessed. My new super long 1800mm design is going to cause me some problems and I have to decide whether it’s worth…

  • After chatting with some of the guys on the MYCNCUK forum it seems steel is a lot cheaper than I thought it was. In fact 50x50x4 mild steel box section can be had for almost the same price as and equivalent piece…

  • Having realized that SBR20 rails are 45mm wide I scrapped the 80x40x4 box section in favour of 50x50x4 – should have checked that before designing the thing I suppose. I then plugged the figures into the gantry stiffness calculator and, if I…

  • So there was quite a break between day one and two of this CNC build which was probably a mistake but nowt I can do about that now. After much debate my better half has convinced me to try building…

  • After several seconds of hard thought I’ve come up with a name for the machine the “Doozer V1”. My nick name is Doozer and I can’t think of a better (imaginary) creature to name the machine after than one that…

  • For years now I have wanted to build a CNC machine. I don’t know why they have just captured my imagination and stuck there. I think it might be the mix of skills required that appeals, woodwork, metalwork, electronics and…

  • In the previous part I discussed most of the major components in the power supply. In this part I wrap up the discussion by talking about the smoothing capacitor and other components that will be needed.

  • In the previous part of this series I looked at the calculations needed to determine the current and voltage the stepper power supply should be built to provide. In this part I start to discuss the components that the power…