Lil' Red
Cheap Craigslist CNC with a hilariously hacked together controller, being brought up to date with an ECP5 FPGA based controller and LinuxCNC.
The CNC is built around an older Central Machinery/Harbor Fright mill and a conversion kit from a now defunct company, FusionCNC (oh howdy how modern search results made that hard to find).
It’s equipt with CW-5045 stepper drivers HS23..xx stepper motors.
In Action
Links
Logs
Enclosuring In
Staying in the theme of this basically being a junk build CNC, I wanted to spend as little on the enclosure as possible. Not having anything suitable around the shop, I headed to one of my happy places. Habitat for Humanities ReStore.
And as luck would have it, I found something that might work on my first visit, and with a $16/25% off tag. A bargain at twice the price.
In the Beginning
Luck, patients and Craigslist saved searches have built my workshop. This project began no differently.
On a fine Friday morning I woke up to an ad for a cheap CNC. $275 if I recall. Couple of bad pictures showed at the very least, there was probably $275 worth of drivers, steppers and ball screws at the least, plus a pretty dusty desktop mull and what looked like a decent CNC conversion. That alone was a time saver enough to justify the price. The owner had inherited machine but never ended up using it, and decided it was time to free up the space in the garage. I’d apparently missed a CNC Lathe a couple days earlier!