Wobblycogs Workshop

  • Well I’ve found my new favourite paint in CombiColor. It goes on smoothly with very little odour and the coverage is pretty good considering it’s yellow which doesn’t tend to cover very well. That lot you see in the picture…

  • Before I piled into drilling holes in the actual steel that will make the frame I thought it was best to do a dry run with some of the off-cuts that I have. I’m really glad I decided to do…

  • The big clean up continued over the last few days. I was beginning to think that perhaps this coating on the steel should be left in place and that was confirmed by someone on the CNC forum. It seems steel…

  • The last few days have been devoted to the steel for the base. Someone I met through the CNC forum offered to source and cut the steel for me which has saved me a big job and I collected the…

  • Before I got all carried away and did something all unnecessary, like spend money, I thought I should try hand routing some aluminium. The compound table is only £100 but that’s £100 I wouldn’t have to spend on something else…

  • For the last few days I’ve mostly just been doing research into how I’ll actually build the frame and the rest of the machine. I found a really cheap welder (stock clearance) which I almost bought but I’m glad I…

  • I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading of build logs in the last week and a some tinkering in sketchup to try and improve the design. One of the things that I constantly read people being advised to do…

  • I’ve been adding a bit to the design over the last day or two but I’ve been struggling a little with the diagrams provided by Chai (linearmotionbearings2008 on eBay). They look like scans of scans of badly taken photos and…

  • Now that I’ve redesigned the frame it’s time to start adding bolts to the drawing to find out whether I can actually hold everything together. It might seem a little superfluous to add every single bolt but there’s a couple of good reasons to…

  • No matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise I just wasn’t happy with the design of the frame. Having the legs on the inside of the frame just felt an accident waiting to happen so I bit the…

  • I was reading this build thread yesterday realised I was trying to rush this project and that something was going to go wrong if I didn’t slow down, do a bit more homework and spend longer on the design. I really wanted…

  • After much dithering I decided to go with the 2510 screws and some powerful nema 34 steppers. I’ve not picked the motors and drivers yet but looking at what’s been recommended to me by others I can clearly get something…

  • In an effort to keep the screw length down I moved things around in the design and did a stack of calculations for different screw and motor sizes and then did a bit of pricing up. This spanned a couple…

  • So it turns out that 1500mm is a magic length for home made CNC machines, who could have guessed. My new super long 1800mm design is going to cause me some problems and I have to decide whether it’s worth…

  • After chatting with some of the guys on the MYCNCUK forum it seems steel is a lot cheaper than I thought it was. In fact 50x50x4 mild steel box section can be had for almost the same price as and equivalent piece…