Homemade CNC machine

| Part 1:

| Part 2: | Part 3: || Warning: not for the faint of geek.

It's a _lot_ easier to build these critters out of baltic birch ply with good beefy metal parts where they'll do some good.

Of course, the easy way to build a CNC machine is with another CNC machine. :-)

If you weren't around to suffer (step by step) through my building one of these you can still see the final step by following the link below.

My current CNC project is a machine to process 1km spools of 0.1mm x

35mm aluminum ribbon into slats for solar heating panel heat exchanger/absorber units. It'll cut the ribbon to length, form a parabolic cross section, and neatly stack finished slats at the rate of (about) one slat/sec. This one will be (mostly) baltic birch and ipe. (I got really tired of cutting this stuff with scissors and forming with a manually-operated SPF press.) When it's done, I'll be able to specify slat geometry and quantity at the keyboard and go do something else while the machine does the drudgework.

-- Morris Dovey DeSoto Solar DeSoto, Iowa USA