IZation Labs DIY CNC Router

Our DIY CNC Router

At the beginning of this year, which means a solid seven months ago at the time of writing this, I found myself fueling the flames of a curious interest in CNC machines. CNC, or Computed Numerically Controlled or some variation of the same, is just a fancy way of saying a machine that does some kind of job, and is controlled using a computer. CNC machines can be found in lots of factories and assembly lines. If you have ever visited a factory of any kind or even watched many ‘how its made’ videos, you are sure to have seen some kind of CNC machine. CNC does not refer to any single kind of machine, but to the control system that many machines can have. Lathes, routers, mills, plotters, robotic arms, all kinds of equipment can fall into the realm of CNC. The simplest example is a standard desktop printer:

Type a letter. Click print. Assuming you haven’t let the ink cartridge run out (as I so often do) and you’ve kept the paper tray refreshed (as I so often don’t), in a matter of seconds you will have a sheet of paper with your letter printed out, ready to be used for whatever purpose it was intended. That printer is a kind of CNC machine.

Inside the printer are belts, screws, motors, and some kind of ‘tool’, in this case a form of print head. The computer sends signals to the printer to move motor y, which feeds paper through the machine in a very accurate, measured manner. Another motor (x) receives the signal to start moving the print head back and forth across the page as the paper is fed through the printer. The print head is also receiving a signal to deposit ink. Moments later, the ink has been deposited onto the page with the proper accuracy and you are looking at very precise, quality text, assuming your printer has been built in the past decade or so.

While printers are interesting, I already had one that kind of works, and ten more sitting in my shop in my giant parts bin, so what was the next logical step above ‘printer’? Well. CNC router is what I decided, logic be darned.

A week or two after deciding I wanted to built a CNC router, which is a machine that controls wood working tools using a computer, I bounced the idea off of fellow College-Now graduate of 2008 Clifford Green, who jumped on the bandwagon as well. We decided to split the cost in half, and over the following seven months we talked, planned, purchased, soldered, cut, drilled, routed, assembled, and nearly every other project related verb that applies. Pictured to the left is the final product.

We named it Takun, because both of us are big FLCL fans. It’s our brand new home made CNC router. It is incredibly accurate and so far extremely useful. In the month or so that we have had it running, it has already surpassed my expectations by far. Clifford and I were able to build it for half the price of a production machine, if not less. We made up for that money saved in effort, however. Together, we calculated the complete build time was very close to 120 man hours, so it goes without saying that we spent what little time both our schedules were free working out in the workshop until the early hours of more than one morning.

The original design can be found here. All of the wood was cut by hand, no CNC machines were used in the production of Takun. For anyone interested, the x and y resolution is a supposed 1/2000 of an inch. For a home made piece of equipment running, at the moment, a Dremel with a carbide bit as its tooling, this thing is quite the amazing machine. Below is a time lapse video of a sign being cut out by the machine, and following that is the image gallery, with some build images and final pictures of the machine, as well as photos of other items we have made so far.