Somewhere amongst the cat pictures, reaction gifs and weight loss photos, crowdsourced bulletin board and news site Reddit is capable of churning out some rather interesting show and tell design-related stories. Among others we’ve seen include a ‘husband of the year’ candidate who fabricated a race-ready bicycle for his competitive racer wife from scratch as well as a full-breakdown explanation of last year’s Apple iPhone 6 Plus Bendgate.
More recently, a user by the name of 805maker (presumably a maker located in the 805 area code of Santa Barbara, California) shared his build process for creating a home-built 4’x4′ CNC router for his garage using plans he purchased for $75 from Joe’s CNC, a CNC project site.
With a majority of CNC routers this size costing tens of thousands of dollars, 805Maker was capable of building his own for $3,800 including the CAM software, end mills and a dust collector.
“This is the Hybrid 4×4 Rack and Pinion model with a welded base instead of the bolt together unit strut base,” said 805maker. “It’s using a Hitachi M12VC router. Motion is handled by HobbyCNC stepper controller kit and NEMA 23 steppers. It is set up to rapid at 700 in/min. It may be able to go faster, but that’s plenty scary.”
Cutting/Drilling parts needed for the stand
Starting stand assembly
95% assembled and on wheels!
Painting starts!
Now it’s starting to look like something.
Lots and lots of holes to drill.
Gantry assembled.
Time to work on electronics / step-down gears for rack/pinion.
Final assembly.
805maker plans on using his new 4′ x 4′ router for creating speakers, artwork and high-powered rocketry, however “It will very likely end up in the local maker space as soon as they have room for it,” he adds.
To check out his build in-full, head over to his full project build photo album. For your own CNC router build plans, head over to Joe’s CNC.
