Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Anatomy of a CNC mill”.
Crysta carpenter here rocket brand studios.com, and this is my CNC mill. I’Ve actually had a lot of people. Ask me questions about this and asked me to make CNC videos, and so we’ve been considered this an introductory video to exactly these machines are about what this particular machine is about, and just kind of give you an overview of what’s going on here. So, first and foremost, this is a three axis machine, which means this cutter head can move in X, the table, slides back and forth for Y, and then the whole cutter head can go up and down for Z. So that’s three axis. I actually have a fourth axis and I’ll show you that in a second and afford half access and I’ll show you that in a second, but at the end of the day a piece of material is clamped here. A design file goes from design software into what they call cam software. We tell the Machine how big the bit is: you’re going to use cut the inside of this, the outside of that line. You know that kind of thing cut in this order, etc, etc, and then that cam software spits out what they call G code G code is basically just a list of coordinates X.
This Y, that Z this and those coordinates, go from the computer to the stepper motors and allow the machine to move okay. So, let’s take a closer look at exactly how this machine works. These are called linear bearings. These are actually called fully supported, linear bearings because they have this backbone down the length of them these. These are called ball screws and there’s actually a very fancy nut on each of these, and each of these gets spun by the stepper motor. Now I purchased all of these as a set, so I got the the X bearings, the Y linear bearings, the Z, bearings and all three ball screws lead screws all in one kit from eBay, and then this entire machine was built around those dimensions. As you can see here, here’s the two linear bearings themselves sliding on the rails. This is for the the y-axis the table and we scoot around here you can see the bearings you know, sticking out the back now spacing of these two bearings based on the size of the table, was just a simple calculation of how much travel I wanted versus How wide I could make those to keep the table stable and not Rocking.
You can see the same thing here. The X bearings are sitting there and then there’s a total of six Z, bearings, which are considerably smaller, so I’ll use actually more bearings to just stiffen it up a little bit you’re. Looking there again, another lead screw another ball screw with the stepper motor. On top, this is, what’s called a stepper motor it it spins, but it spins as a series of steps.
In my case 3200 steps for revolution, you can see I’ve got one on X, Y .