IZation Labs

Well, it’s that time of year again: when college students around the world start to pull their hair out because they didn’t get enough work done the previous nine tenths of the semester, and now have to pick up the slack as finals loom. Oh? That doesn’t happen to you? Perhaps it’s just me.

Graduation cometh, and verily, in 13 days I shall walk, or die trying.

On to the fun! The small CNC Router we built a few years ago at IZation Labs is still kicking! It was used to make around 20 Wine Glass Holders for Christmas Gifts this past year. The following video shows the basic process from start to finish.

Yes. I do need to get more sleep.

-Lace

So this Christmas, just as most more recent Christmi (that’s plural for Christmas, by the way. No, really.) I did a bit of woodworking out in the shop. Unlike the past few years, this Christmas season I had my 2010 CNC router at my disposal and decided to design and manufacture some gifts which otherwise would have been beyond my skills as a craftsman. Of course, there were some speed bumps along the way, but eventually everything came together.

This old kitchen counter top (our shop used to be apartments) was torn out and rebuilt. It makes a perfect home for our CNC.

A month or two ago my CNC router was finally relocated to it’s semi permanent home in a dedicated CNC room of the shop (more importantly, off of my father’s main workbench). Fast forward to the final days of exams here at Eastern Michigan, around the 15th of December and I had begun sketching out a rough version of a vertical gun rack for a cousin of mine who recently received his first BB gun. A few minutes of modeling in CAD and setting up proper toolpaths later and the different components were lines of code just waiting to be transformed into a beautiful Christmas gift.

Around the 20th or so I started fabrication of the gun rack, while simultaneously designing some name plates for my sister’s two horses and, as a bit of a gag, one for my father’s angus as well. All went well until the last set of gun rack parts was to be manufactured. The machine kept ‘glitching’, for lack of a better explanation at the time. After ruining two or three pieces of perfectly good raw material, I finally figured out what was wrong. The aluminum coupler between the gantry stepper motor and a through rod was not tight enough and was slipping instead of turning the way it was meant to.

All I should have had to do was tighten up one set screw to temporarily fix it. It turns out, however, that when we originally built the machine we didn’t grind a flat spot for the set screw to bite into. That we used a threaded rod inside continues to confound me, my guess is that it is all we had on hand. The fact that the machine had operated accurately for even this long surprised me. To fix this problem, I had to tear down at least a third of the machine to get to the rod, grind it, and reattach the motor shaft properly.

Three hours later, (around midnight) the machine was back in operation. It was too late to keep working, I would continue the following day. Sleep deprivation and high speed cutting tools don’t mix well.

When the parts for the gun rack had finished machining, I started working on the three signs I had planned to make. They read ‘Bailey’, ‘Danny’, and ‘Mac’. Mac is the angus, named after the respective fast food burger. While the signs were being machined, I began the assembly (read as ‘gluing and clamping’) of the gun rack.

The sign making went relatively smoothly, although a failure of motor function (my own, not the machine’s) meant I needed a band aid on one or two fingers before Christmas eve had arrived. You can see a few of the steps above, from machining the actual signs from cherry to clear coating, painting, then sanding and clear coating again to get the black inlaid text effect.

Pictured above is the gun rack as it exists in its final form. It is meant to be mounted vertically with the butt of the BB gun resting in the inset portion of the top of the box, and its barrel poking up through a hole at the top. The box can be used to store BB’s and small targets, or anything else that will fit inside it.

Last but not least, the evening before returning to school I managed to get my hands on a piece of what I believe to be some kind of Plexiglas and wanted to machine it. Having no idea what to design, and having just rekindled my already fierce love for all things ‘Back to the Future’ (copyright Universal, I’m not profiting from this, yada, yada) by purchasing the new BTTF video game, I decided that a quick flux capacitor would make for a clean yet easy quick project. The phrase ‘All I’ve got is time’ was simply the first thing that came to mind. Twenty minutes later and I was on my way out to the shop.

I had never machined plexi before. First thing I realized; Yep. That’s much harder than wood. Next time, multiple small passes at a slower feed rate. Second thing I realized; plexi makes a MESS. I will be installing a chip collection system before I machine much more Plexiglas. Overall I was relatively pleased with it, however, and plan to do more in the future (har har).

Let me know what you think, and as always, if you like what you read here feel free to Subscribe to Posts with the link at the top of this page.

-Lace

Here’s a quick look at a small piece of a larger project I’m working on. (Probably the largest I’ve ever tackled at IZation Labs.) Pictured is a wooden box that was machined using our CNC router here at the shop. Inside is the power supply and control circuitry for a set of 3 CNC stepper motors, of the same kind used on the CNC router itself.

In the end I’m very satisfied with the build quality of the enclosure, it’s much safer than our current power supply, which I won’t post pictures of because photos alone may be enough to electrocute our readers into the next zip code. Next for the box is some (hopefully) light troubleshooting on the electrical end, and then refocusing the remains of my shop time on the larger side of this project. I’ll keep you up to date.

-Lace

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Just a brief update to any would be viewers;

I spent a few hours at the Kehoe center in Shelby today meeting the newest College-Now students and speaking to them about technology, all of which went very well, I’m excited to get to know and work with these new ‘eager young minds’.

Following the line of CNC machines, below is a video of a machine called the RepRap, a diy fabricated 3D printer that is capable of, for all intents and purposes, printing copies of itself. Just like how the CNC Router I posted in the last is now being used to machine parts for a similar albeit much larger machine, the RepRap  is a machine that can build itself. Neat, huh?

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-Lace

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.

Click any of the images to see them full size. Feel free to leave any questions or comments, and if you liked the article, don’t forget to subscribe!

-Lace

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately concerning CNC Mills, homemade ones in particular. Now, I won’t get too in depth before I give anything away, but I found some very interesting full size CNC machines with five axes of movement. What’s that mean?

Well, most entry level or home made CNC mills/routers have three axes of movement. X, Y, and Z. What this means is that the movement of the cutting tool is to the ‘left and right’, ‘up and down’ and ‘in and out’. This creates a decent range of movement, and works especially well on mostly two dimensional parts.

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