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!

In the end, I got not only the machine but a decent pile of stock, some aluminum plate, alu and brass/bronze round bar (including a 5" diameter ~12" round). The vise that can be seen in the picture and an addition VERY nice Shars precision vise, worth about twice what I paid for everything. If I where a flipper instead of a hoarder this would have been a good day. As a hoarder, it was also a good day.

This is what we got

Who’s in Control here?⌗

The controller that it came with was a comical hack job that I can’t help but admire.

Is that a NAS?

Is that a NAS? A Shuttle clone? Some corporate thin client? I don’t know but I’m impressed with the amount of non-desktop-computing hardware stuffed into it.

HACK THE PLANET!

There’s a motherboard under there somewhere. In addition to having 3 stepper drivers, a janky little parallel port controller and a second power supply stuffed in there. A true work of art.

After a single test run to verify all the parts I wanted work was a success it started getting stripped down while I looked for a new enclosure.