Satisfyingly good

but a bit boring after 3 hours!

Not perfectly square but far better than it was.

I would say that the upright column and the baseplate above would be at least 60kg so feeling this little cutter should give good results in most non ferrous metals.

Slight change in direction and while three axis sounds like fun…

After messing about with some cad drawings I think that maybe five is the magic number!

This mini mill will start of with the stock three, then I will add the 4th as a driven rotary table mounted on the milling bed either vertically or flat on its back. Once I have this set up and dialed in I will need to add an other motor drive to the controller and a second rotational axis where the spindle mounts.

I have lost count of the number of wires this 4 axis cnc controller has but as you can see they are starting to look like less of a birds nest!

Above is soon to be replaced 24vdc supply, relays, drive power supply, spindle controller and a motherboard for the 4 stepper drives.

On the Left is a 2.2kw VFD to power my spindle, a bank of fuses, soft start timer to short out the current limiting resistor and  a bleed resistor. The transformer is huge 1000va beast to feed the steppers with the juice they will need.

Many hours were spent making custom shielded cables and then working out how to ground the many different systems together without forming any ground loops.

Each drive has its own heatsink and fan that….

Pulls the cooler air from the rear of the large cabinet. As I plan to cut a lot of carbon I hope to have this system in a sealed enclosure, hopefully the fans create enough air flow to use the large surface area of the steel enclosure to dump the heat.

So some big buttons, a few lights and a joy stick complete the package!

After many late nights, strong coffees and the odd bursts of profanity I have a working (and painfully messy and unsafe) cnc controller! Any electricians out there keen to have a little look and double check that once I have this rats nest of bundle wires, relays and switches conform is to Nz electrical code?