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See the Users Modifications page as well
Brian Gerber is selling this lovely little CNC mill called the "Raptor" for an unbelievably low price at:
http://www.linearcnc.com
Sam Colwell says:
The CNC machine is almost finished (only some cover plates need to be finished up, and then it will be complete - but cover plates don't stop me from playing with it :) I have added some pictures of the CNC machine. Unfortunately the linisteppers are mounted well inside the machine, so I took some pictures of them separately (they live on a swing-out heatsink). I also took some pictures of milling a PCB. I'm using a 0.020" end mill and the chuck is spinning, but the flash of the camera stops the action.I was originally told it was an electron scanning microscope, however someone who used to work on a similar machine at IBM recognized it as a wafer inspection machine. Sometimes these machines had microscopes on them, sometimes they had "bed of nails" testing jigs on them. It was used to inspect wafers before they were cut up into dice and put into chips. The microscope (or whatever) bits had been stripped before I got the machine.
Every year I help the mechanical department at Vermont Technical College with some small electromechanical projects (I work in the computer dept. there). The students design a mechanical system with some stepper and DC motors. They give me the specs for what they need the motors to do and I program pics (usually 16F628's) to do the work. I usually donate about 80 hours over the course of a year to working with these students, even though they aren't in my department. The mechanical faculty really appreciate it, and so they asked me what I wanted. Money is hard to transfer between departments, so I said I wanted an NC drill machine to drill the custom circuit boards I make. While I can get boards made out of house at reasonable rates, there's nothing like having a working board that same day (or be able to find the stupid mistakes and fix the board that same day :).
VTC gets donations of used equipment from various corporations from time to time. This wafer inspector was in there. The microscope parts had already been removed. The students made the table that has edge clamps and a corner clamp to hold circuit boards. They removed the servos (we didn't get the servo controllers) and found small but powerful steppers to replace them. They made custom brackets to use the original servo motor clamps to hold the stepper motors. They took a pre-existing Z axis and machined it to fit in this machine and hold the drill motor (which is one of the original servos from the machine), They machined the heat sink in the back to have a flat surface, and it actually ducts the heat out to the sides of the machine as well. The flip up grill over the linisteppers they made as well. They also machined covers for all the holes on the machine where there used to be stuff that was removed before we got the machine.
The X/Y table is original (and an absolutely beautiful platform with virtually no slop and very little drag). The table, Z axis, and steppers were added, along with the linisteppers. The x and y are on high power half steps. The Z axis is on the 9 microstep mode (for smoother drilling motion).
I've milled a few boards with it. I'm learning to play with the settings to get it to come out well.
Brian Gerber says:
Boards work great! Just got to the point where I can use the router ,need to do the finishing work on the router and the control box. Here's a few pics.
the new and improved heatsink assembly is 4 pounds of aluminum with dual 24 volt muffin fans! Coooooool!
with 118 oz inch motors and 1/4-28 threaded rod at 5 ipm I'm getting 50 pounds of force on the axis!
A Sherline Mill conversion by K.P. Damen of www.damencnc.nl for one of his clients:
Jan Groen made this small milling and engraving machine. It is running on linisteppers and you can hear the soft sooth whine in this video. This was one of its first runs... Right click and select play to see the video. check your volume first!
