Well, the beast is finished, but not without some hand wringing…I had to redo some of the z-axis as it was too tight for the servo. Turned out that some superglue had bound the lock nut to the bushing in the MDF, so a little brute force to undo and re-setting did the trick. I also took a needle file and smoothed out the holes in the z-axis carrier so it was smooth traveling up the guide rods. Silly me also put some of the bottom supports in the base the wrong way round so the guide holes for the wires were on the opposite side of the machine…no big deal really as I just drilled some others on the other side… There’s a forum over on the MakeSmith site for all of us Beta-testers putting the machine together and the issues we face and solve (eventually!). That’s one of the great things about projects like these, and Open Source Hardware in general, there’s plenty of like-minded and helpful souls out there with good advice. One such person posted a really ingenious way to smooth the travel of the carriers on the guide rods and that proved very useful. Pulling the rods out one end with everything in place and using a drill to rotate them to help smooth the guide holes really helped get everything working smoothly for me…a great tip! Here is the completed CNC with a dremel in place…
I’m running this with a Mac and the Ground Control software has a few issues at the moment, most notably random crashes that disconnect the arduino from the computer. Bug reports have been filed, but until the software is a little more stable, then I think cutting anything too complicated may have to wait..There’s also a small issue with the other servo’s jittering a tiny amount whilst another axis moves…not sure what’s going on there, but again I await comment from Bar/Tom on the forum who seem to be on-top of answering everyone’s questions!
Here’s a small video of the machine in action doing a few simple movements (apologies for the somewhat amateurish camera work…).