Prototype: CNC Miller (a.k.a. Woody)

After "sort of" being done building my vanguard Arcade system, I then realize I needed something "sturdier" as I have to keep putting the housing back together on my arcade after each "hard" playing. I then look around the internet and came across home-made CNC milling machine.

So off to building a CNC machine I go and my first build was from instructables.com, which I built out of wood. After several weeks of building, I came up with my wooden version of my CNC router, which I lovingly named "Woody" (for obvious reason)… It wasn’t pretty, and neither was the cut for the panel, but it was a step forward from vanguard sheet =)

This particular build was fairly straight forward. A lot of the information can be gotten from Instructables.com. What I have opted for is the 3-axis (i.e. X, Y and Z travel) with threaded rod run (as opposed to belts and gears). The motors are NEMA23 with parallel controller so that I could run it off Mach3 software.

The 1st cut was done in my toilet =) to mitigate the dust and burn smell. As mentioned earlier, was a quick and dirty way to get my housing but it was sure fu-gly.

However, having an hands-on experience to cut, assemble, build and set-up this home-made CNC has really taught me to "underlying" principle of CNC build which in the later months, setup the learning "premises" for my big Ox build and other CNC machinery which we managed to acquired over the next following months (mentioned in my other post).