Weekend projects

This will be short, but I just had to throw it on the blog.

First off, I did a little rework on the small cnc machine I keep in the third bedroom/office area. I built this one to do small parts inside without having to go out in the garage and fire up the monster cnc converted mill out there. That thing eats energy at a prodigious rate and most things I make are smaller. Anyway, I built in a new circuit in my home made controller board and added automated Z axis part height. Everyone out there can roll their eyes at the geekiness but it saves me a TON of setup work that I had to do before. Here’s a pic of the machine, built from the cabinet up from parts I had laying around.

It’s kinda Frankenstein, but it works great. This pic is after the mods and a test pattern run to check performance. The pattern was a simple DXF file of  a chicken I had laying around and had Mach3 do a quick convert on. The results were really nice though, ‘specially after I ran some stain in the cuts and sanded the top down.

I had a scrap of oak to run the file on. It looks good, so I may have to cut it down and route the edge to clean up the block and give it to mom.

If my friend at ThisRusticSoul.com sees this and ever gets her blog up then maybe you will see some of the work she does. LOL!