MACHINES · Mar 2016
CNC Mill Conversion
An old benchtop mill, an engine lift, three steppers and an Arduino.
I managed to get an old Menards upright mill. After an engine lift or two it was in my garage, where I figured out how to use it and then how to turn it into a CNC: stepper motors on the axes, driver boards, an Arduino running the control.
It cut. It was also impossibly sloppy. The lesson was in the machine itself: the power and the motors it takes to move iron precisely are exactly why the real ones cost what they cost.
This was the first of the garage machines. The Pi car and the rover came the same year; the tracked robot two years later.