X-Carve Assembled

The mechanical assembly only took a few nights after work to do the initial frame and sub assemblies.

I watched the videos and read through the portions of the instructions from inventables that I purchased and would need. It went very well I did not have any issues, so follow these and watch the videos for your build ( side note I am a mechanical designer for an automation company, so I make similar designs and make drawings for this type of stuff, obviously not exactly but similar) I downloaded the model on grab cad so I had also seen every part in CAD and could reference that if I needed more detail.

I built my own waste board measured and drilled over 150 holes and bought the inserts from inventables instead of using the inventables kit.

I purchased yonico bits off of amazon because of posts on the forum and the 1/2 and 3/4 plunge bits from MLCS

I am not a huge fan of electrical design and assembly but I compiled my power supplies, Stepper motor drivers, stepper motors ( purchased from StepperOnline ) , enclosure, Hicon power supply from mouser, IoT spindle controller from a post on inventables forum for my Dewalt 611.

I took a weekend and assembled my controls package and wired all of my motors, limit switches, router,...... I soldered and wired all the components and excuse the mess I am waiting on a couple panel connectors to finish up the last of my controls including a touch plate for tool changes.

Finished product. Fully operational and "cutting" foam at first.

Some actual footage of it running.

Thank you for reading more to come!

Comments

X-Carving 3D STLs

Reading around on the inventables forums, I found a post about a new web based CAM generator from STLs, it also does other functions FDM and LASER, called kiri moto . For a web based CAM generator it does a good job, it is a work in progress and has been updated with new features already. Read the thread above for all that has happened in the past month. As for my project, I had some STL files for things I have 3D printed in the past, so I sliced and processed some code from kiri:moto. You can manage your tools and Post Processors in the web page and post code quickly. The videos and instructions are good to start but the results are the true test. Overall I am very happy with how it cut, I started in foam just so I could not worry about stray code and as it is not a simulator, like some other CAM software. It made good code for a free web based CAM generator and I look forward to the new additions as the developer continues improving this tool. At this time I am...

X-Carve calibration

I followed these steps: for the X and Y using the same shinwa machinist rule and an engraving bit: I used a dial indicator to calibrate my Z axis as in this video I then calculated the change from the measured vs actual that I came up with from the initial setup and changed my settings in Mach4. I have not had to re-calibrate since I originally setup my X-Carve but I have also not pushed it too hard as of this point.

My X-Carve first project

Well not my first ( I used the 2d drawings from inventables for the clamps to make a couple of clamps) but the most in-depth and coolest one to date. I designed a hat and mitten rack for a friends children in SolidWorks, it provides 10 hangers per child for gloves, mittens, boots, or hats. It was designed around the constraints that it must all be machined from one 31" x 31" piece of wood. This includes the two halves and the base or feet. The two halves interlock to form what looks like a tree and that allows it to be small while having plenty of space for all of the drying needs of two small children. V Carve Pro 7.0 is used for creating the code for my x carve to run in Mach4 I spaced out all the pieces in Solid Works by 7.5 mm to insure a 1/4 end mill could pass between all the parts without nicking and damaging any of the parts. I then used 1/4 Yonico end mill at 30ipm with a step down of 1.0 mm and a 40% step over to profile all of the pieces. I also used th...

PTO X-Carve

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