Plastic CNC Machine

I had some time on my hands and an accidental discovery which was a 3D printable CNC machine. The machine in itself was hard to assemble, screw positions were hard to reach, but hey, now it cuts circuit boards!

Requirements

To successfully create one you need a couple of things which you can find on TinyCNC (thingiverse) (it is in German).

I didn’t use the same control board as the person from thingiverse, but used a MKS-DLC32 (github) instead. Additionally the motor used is some no-name motor with the same dimensions.

The process

The process was actually quite tedious, because of two reasons:

• the printing (because of large parts) was needed to be done carefully as the plastic I used was PETG and it did have bend here-and-there on the corners
• the screwing process of the motor mounts was hard to do as there is not screwdriver space accounted for in the designs.

To not talk only about the bad things:

• The bottom part and top part assembly was quite easy and well made
• The TinyCNC has one of the best assembly guides i have ever seen

Due to things lying in corners in my workshop, instead of using the TinyCNC control box, i created my own for the MKS-DLC32 with screen. It was a quick and dirty OpenSCAD design as seen in the picture of the CNC machine.

The cutting

The cutting works quite well (at low speeds), but i must say that the Y axis (because of the bendiness of plastic) can be moved by +-1mm if applying not-too-much force. Made some wooden pieces for friends, and tried out some PCBs for myself and it gets the job done, although not in a perfect manner.

The review

All in all i used up too much plastic for not enough gain. So maybe next time the used designs would be more metal based to reduce the Y axis jigging.

(it’s standing for a long time, may look chaotic)