CNC Drill/Mill

[slc55]

This is something I have been drawing on my spare evenings during the past few weeks.
It will hopefully be the new cnc pcb drill/mill that I build during the summer, (depending on how the work/time/money ratio balances out).
It is not meant to be a serious engineering design just practice at using Freecad. There is a lot of detail missing from the model.
Freecad crashed a lot of times while I was drawing this but I did find the software a lot like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, once you get going with it then progress happens very quickly. All in all a thoroughly enjoyable few evenings work.



Main frame


Table top removed



XAxis drive


Zaxis bits



Main extrusions


I have built a few of these machines now and as soon as I finish one, I look at it and think that I could have done it better and I have no doubt this one will be the same

[jmaustpc]

that looks great.

I like your use of colour, it adds clarity to the design.

[NormandC]

So that's what the ballscrew was for!!!

It's great seeing people designing machinery in FreeCAD.

I'd be curious to know how you modeled the aluminum extrusions. Did you pad a single complex sketch or did you use multiple features (including Part Design transformation tools)?

[slc55]

The ballscrews, yes that was fun. Drawing the helix and sweeping the profile for the long screw on the X axis was not succesful (it worked about 98% succesful but still useable on short lengths) so it is drawn as a seperate drawing and made of 4 short pieces imported as step files and joined with a boolean combine (68 minutes, I am very patient), and then the whole thing is imported as a step file into this design. For some reason each part renders a different color.

The frame extrusion was the first serious attempt I had at using Freecad and at first I tried to draw the whole cross section in complete detail, but the sketcher almost ground to a halt dealing with the constraints. It was taking 90 seconds to add a 0.5mm radius to the corners of the profile, so I changed to drawing just the outline and adding the tee slots and centre holes as a through all pocket, and leaving out all the unnecessary details. The program then ran several orders of magnitude faster.

I might have drawn the star shaped holes in the centre of the extrusion with a 2d cad program and imported them as dxf files, I had so many tries to do this I cant remember the details of how I did it.



I forgot to say, Thanks to all the guys putting all the hard work into making this program. I have done programming in the past and I know what a grind it can be dealing with the uninteresting parts.

[rufflivin]

I know its an old thread but i must say that this is very wonderful that you guys explain every thing in detail. thanks for the posts guys.