Groove Ho(l)mes
After more work than I anticipated making the Y homing sensor mounting block and making a bracket and sensor setup for the Z axis, tearing down half…
Home Is Where You Hang Your Hat
Unfortunately, back in October, I discovered that my level of conversion kit for my mill did not include the hardware for home sensors for each axis. Everything…
It’s Like Christmas
Here’s the result of a lot of small ebay auctions last week… Our office manager gave me quite a look when she walked in with no fewer…
Sloppy Z
So I’m having some major trouble with slop in my Z axis, regardless of how tightly I’ve cranked down the gib adjuster. While what follows may not…
Progress
So the CNC conversion is really not quite done, even though I’ve been using the machine to create parts. Still lots of cleanup, fine tuning, and other…
First Metal!
I made my first part out of aluminum last evening. I’ve been slowly designing the electronics enclosure, and I needed a means to mount and cool the…
Big Ostentatious Power Switch – Experiment #1
I’ve been starting to think about making an enclosure for my friend Mike’s UCD400 amplifier kit. I want to use my new CNC toy, obviously, and make…
First Successful Testing
After sorting out with the manufacturer that the lead screws are in fact imperial, not metric, everything makes a lot more sense. I had been wondering whether…
Y Axis Debugging
Posted for the EMC2 folks on IRC. Here is a simple test with my dial indicator. Here is another test, which uses my “poor man’s DRO” to…
More Pictures
Here’s the result of another one of the included G-Code files from EMC2. Superficially it looks pretty neat, but it exposes some of the issues I’m currently…
It’s Alive!
Well, the part hasn’t yet arrived from Australia, despite the company shipping it out with all due speed. Kudos to them for doing that, but the fact…
Pictures of the Conversion (so far…)
Here are some photos of the conversion so far, mostly the tear-down and building up the Z axis. In other news, the kit manufacturers have supposedly shipped…
Kit Installation Has Begun
Last night I finally was able to start the process of tearing down my milling machine and rebuilding it with the parts from the CNC kit. I…
Kit Has Arrived!
The ProMiCA CNC kit has arrived! Now just the significant task of putting it all together remains… Kit quality is quite high – part fit and finish…
Three Cheers for Flat-Rate Postage Boxes
My linear power supply arrived today, and it’s big and heavy as I expected. After poring over data sheets and doing more research and fretting and calculating,…